8-6: Creating Memories for Events in People's Lives

8-6a

Creating Childhood Memories

repressed childhood memory

Memories that have been pushed out of a person's consciousness.

The issues raised by cases like the Gary Romona case are complicated and disturbing. Child sexual abuse is a serious problem, which should not be minimized. But it is also important to be sure accusations are based on accurate information.

According to a paper by the American Psychological Association (APA) Working Group on Investigation of Memories of Childhood Abuse, (1) most people who were sexually abused as children remember all or part of what happened to them; (2) it is possible for memories of abuse that have been forgotten for a long time to be remembered; and (3) it is also possible to construct convincing pseudomemories for events that never occurred.

What is most interesting about this participant's response is that he didn't remember the wedding the first time but did remember it the second time.

Apparently, hearing about the event and then waiting caused the event to emerge as a false memory. --- This can be explained by familiarity. When questioned about the wedding the second time, the participant's familiarity with the wedding from the first exposure caused him to accept the wedding as having actually happened.

One such case involved 19-year-old Holly, who in the course of therapy for an eating disorder received a suggestion from her therapist that her disorder may have been caused by sexual abuse After further therapy, which included additional suggestions from the therapist, Holly became convinced that her father had repeatedly raped her when she was a child. ---Holly's accusations caused her father, Gary Romona, to lose his $400,000-a-year executive job, his reputation, his friends, and contact with his three daughters. ---Romona sued Holly's therapists for malpractice, accusing them of implanting memories in his daughter's mind.

At the trial, Elizabeth Loftus and other cognitive psychologists described research on the misinformation effect and implanting false memories to demonstrate how suggestion can create false memories for long-ago events that never actually happened Romona won a $500,000 judgment against the therapists. As a result of this case, which highlighted how memory can be influenced by suggestion, a number of criminal convictions based on "recovered memory" evidence have since been reversed.

Imagine that a person is in an experiment in which he or she is told about events that happened in his or her childhood. --- The experimenter provides brief descriptions of events that happened to the person long ago and asks the person to elaborate on each event. --- It isn't surprising that the person recognizes the events because the descriptions were provided to the experimenters by the person's parents. ---The person is therefore able to describe what they remember about the event, and sometimes also provide additional details.

But suddenly the person is stumped because the experimenter has described an event they don't remember. ---For example, here is a conversation that occurred in an experiment by Ira Hyman Jr. and coworkers (1995), in which a bogus event—one that never happened—was presented by the experimenter (E) to the participant (P): E. At age 6 you attended a wedding reception, and while you were running around with some other kids you bumped into a table and turned a punch bowl over on a parent of the bride. P: I have no clue. I have never heard that one before. Age 6?

8-6b

Legal Implications of False Memory Research

In another childhood memory experiment, Kimberley Wade and coworkers (2002) showed participants photographs obtained from family members that showed the participant involved in various events like birthday parties or vacations when they were 4 to 8 years old. They also saw a photograph created in Photoshop that showed them in an event that never happened—taking a hot air balloon ride ---They were shown the photo and asked to describe what they remembered about the event. If they couldn't remember the event, they were told to close their eyes and picture participating in the event.

Participants easily recalled the real events but initially didn't recall taking the hot air balloon ride. ---After picturing the event in their minds and further questioning, however, 35 percent of the participants "remembered" the balloon ride, and after two more interviews, 50 percent of the participants described their experience while riding in the balloon.

In the 1990s a number of highly publicized trials took place in which women who were being treated by therapists experienced a return of what has been called a repressed childhood memory

The hypothesis proposed by some therapists is that this repressed childhood memory can cause psychological problems and that the way to treat the patient's problem is to get them to retrieve the repressed memory. This accomplished using various techniques—hypnosis, guided imagery, strong suggestion—designed to "bring the memory back."

This result is similar to the experiment described earlier in which participants were told that they had turned over a punch bowl at a wedding reception. ---

These studies, and many others, have shown that people can be led to believe that they experienced something in their childhood that never actually happened