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      Creating Memories for False Autobiographical Events in Childhood: A Systematic Review

      research-article
      1 , , 2
      Applied Cognitive Psychology
      John Wiley and Sons Inc.

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          Summary

          Using a framework that distinguishes autobiographical belief, recollective experience, and confidence in memory, we review three major paradigms used to suggest false childhood events to adults: imagination inflation, false feedback and memory implantation. Imagination inflation and false feedback studies increase the belief that a suggested event occurred by a small amount such that events are still thought unlikely to have happened. In memory implantation studies, some recollective experience for the suggested events is induced on average in 47% of participants, but only in 15% are these experiences likely to be rated as full memories. We conclude that susceptibility to false memories of childhood events appears more limited than has been suggested. The data emphasise the complex judgements involved in distinguishing real from imaginary recollections and caution against accepting investigator‐based ratings as necessarily corresponding to participants' self‐reports. Recommendations are made for presenting the results of these studies in courtroom settings. © 2016 The Authors Applied Cognitive Psychology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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          Most cited references48

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          Validity of adult retrospective reports of adverse childhood experiences: review of the evidence.

          Influential studies have cast doubt on the validity of retrospective reports by adults of their own adverse experiences in childhood. Accordingly, many researchers view retrospective reports with scepticism. A computer-based search, supplemented by hand searches, was used to identify studies reported between 1980 and 2001 in which there was a quantified assessment of the validity of retrospective recall of sexual abuse, physical abuse, physical/emotional neglect or family discord, using samples of at least 40. Validity was assessed by means of comparisons with contemporaneous, prospectively obtained, court or clinic or research records; by agreement between retrospective reports of two siblings; and by the examination of possible bias with respect to differences between retrospective and prospective reports in their correlates and consequences. Medium- to long-term reliability of retrospective recall was determined from studies in which the test-retest period extended over at least 6 months. Retrospective reports in adulthood of major adverse experiences in childhood, even when these are of a kind that allow reasonable operationalisation, involve a substantial rate of false negatives, and substantial measurement error. On the other hand, although less easily quantified, false positive reports are probably rare. Several studies have shown some bias in retrospective reports. However, such bias is not sufficiently great to invalidate retrospective case-control studies of major adversities of an easily defined kind. Nevertheless, the findings suggest that little weight can be placed on the retrospective reports of details of early experiences or on reports of experiences that rely heavily onjudgement or interpretation. Retrospective studies have a worthwhile place in research, but further research is needed to examine possible biases in reporting.
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            The reality of repressed memories.

            E Loftus (1993)
            Repression is one of the most haunting concepts in psychology. Something shocking happens, and the mind pushes it into some inaccessible corner of the unconscious. Later, the memory may emerge into consciousness. Repression is one of the foundation stones on which the structure of psychoanalysis rests. Recently there has been a rise in reported memories of childhood sexual abuse that were allegedly repressed for many years. With recent changes in legislation, people with recently unearthed memories are suing alleged perpetrators for events that happened 20, 30, even 40 or more years earlier. These new developments give rise to a number of questions: (a) How common is it for memories of child abuse to be repressed? (b) How are jurors and judges likely to react to these repressed memory claims? (c) When the memories surface, what are they like? and (d) How authentic are the memories?
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              Imagination inflation: Imagining a childhood event inflates confidence that it occurred.

              Counterfactual imaginings are known to have far-reaching implications. In the present experiment, we ask if imagining events from one's past can affect memory for childhood events. We draw on the social psychology literature showing that imagining a future event increases the subjective likelihood that the event will occur. The concepts of cognitive availability and the source-monitoring framework provide reasons to expect that imagination may inflate confidence that a childhood event occurred. However, people routinely produce myriad counterfactual imaginings (i.e., daydreams and fantasies) but usually do not confuse them with past experiences. To determine the effects of imagining a childhood event, we pretested subjects on how confident they were that a number of childhood events had happened, asked them to imagine some of those events, and then gathered new confidence measures. For each of the target items, imagination inflated confidence that the event had occurred in childhood. We discuss implications for situations in which imagination is used as an aid in searching for presumably lost memories.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                c.brewin@ucl.ac.uk
                Journal
                Appl Cogn Psychol
                Appl Cogn Psychol
                10.1002/(ISSN)1099-0720
                ACP
                Applied Cognitive Psychology
                John Wiley and Sons Inc. (Hoboken )
                0888-4080
                08 April 2016
                Jan-Feb 2017
                : 31
                : 1 , Target Article and Commentaries: Creating Memories for False Autobiographical Events in Childhood ( doiID: 10.1002/acp.v31.1 )
                : 2-23
                Affiliations
                [ 1 ]University College London LondonUK
                [ 2 ]Royal Holloway, University of London LondonUK
                Author notes
                [*] [* ] Correspondence to: Chris R. Brewin, Clinical, Educational & Health Psychology, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK.

                E‐mail: c.brewin@ 123456ucl.ac.uk

                Article
                ACP3220 ACP-16-0006.R1
                10.1002/acp.3220
                5248593
                28163368
                cd729810-bebf-4910-a6cb-d047c344ee8f
                © 2016 The Authors Applied Cognitive Psychology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

                This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

                History
                : 12 January 2016
                : 05 February 2016
                : 09 February 2016
                Page count
                Figures: 0, Tables: 4, Pages: 22, Words: 11914
                Categories
                Research Article
                Research Articles
                Custom metadata
                2.0
                acp3220
                January/February 2017
                Converter:WILEY_ML3GV2_TO_NLMPMC version:5.0.2 mode:remove_FC converted:20.01.2017

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry

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