Recovered memories of abuse:new research

New research suggest that memories of abuse recovered through therapy may be less reliable than memories which are recovered spontaneously.

Some years ago an intense debate began about the reliability of recovered memories of abuse when a number of very high profile cases hit the headlines in a number of coutnries. In some of these cases memories of abuse had been recovered through intensive therapy and there was much debate whether such memories could be relied upon as accurate recollections of past events.

The whole issue of the reliability of recovered memory became a very hot topic in the fields of psychology and psychiatry with fierce advocates on both sides.

Elke Geraerts, a psychology post doctoral researcher at Harvard University and Maastricht University, the Netherlands, aimed to try to throw light on this problem using a large-scale research study designed to test the validity of such memories.


Of course people who recover memories in this way will tend to be convinced they are real authentic memories and this makes validating the recovered memories difficult.

Geraerts and her colleagues avoided this problem by using outside sources to corroborate the memories.

The researchers recruited people who reported being sexually abused as children.

They divided them into three groups.
1) Those whose memories were categorized as either "spontaneously recovered" (the participant had forgotten and then spontaneously recalled the abuse outside of therapy, without any prompting),
2) those whose memories had been "recovered in therapy" prompted by suggestion

3) those whose memories ofthe abuse was "continuous" in that they had always been able to recall the abuse.

Interviewers, who had no knowledge of which group the subject fell into, then interviewed other people who could confirm or refute the abuse events. these included others who heard about the abuse soon after it occurred, others who reported also having been abused by the same perpetrator, and those who admitted having committed the abuse.


The results to be published in the July issue of Psychological Science, journal of the Association for Psychological Science, showed that,

1) overall, spontaneously recovered memories were corroborated almost as often (37% of the time) as continuous memories (45%) but were less reliable.

2) memories that were recovered in therapy could not be corroborated at all.

Of course not being able to of confirm that the abuse had happened does not prove that the memory is false. It does however suggest that memories recovered in therapy need to be treated with a great dela of caution, as the therapy context raises the opportunity for suggestion.
.
Source: news release issued by Association for Psychological Science.