Does New Research Lend Credence to Recovered Memory Theory?
Research conducted by Michael Anderson and Collin Green at the University of Oregon is being touted as confirming Sigmund Freud’s theory of repression and, in turn, recovered memories of childhood abuse. But does the new study really provide support for recovered memories? Not really.
In the study, college students were asked to learn pairs of words that had loosely connected meanings. The students practiced the word pairs so that when they heard the first word they could recall the second word from memory.
Some of the students were asked to actively work to forget the word pairs, and in fact in later testing they had a much harder time remembering the word pairs than those students who were told to actively try to remember the word pairs.
What the researchers have demonstrated is hardly controversial — human beings can forget things. In fact we almost certainly have to forget things. Do you remember what you had for breakfast three weeks ago? Probably not. Could you forget what you had for breakfast this morning much more quickly if you actively tried to forget? According to this study, probably.
That, however, is a very long way from a full blown defense of Freudian repression (which has completely unscientific foundations to begin with), and light years from demonstrating that recovered memory is anything but a hoax.
The key with recovered memory, after all, is the claim that memories of traumatic events that have been forgotten can be recalled as long as decades later with incredible clarity and accuracy. When it comes to the accuracy of memory, there are dozens of studies demonstrating that memory is extremely malleable over time and that the process of remembering is an evolving, ongoing process rather than a straightforward sort of data retrieval envisioned by many advocates of recovered memory.
Source:
Some choose to lose memory. Helen Pearson, Nature, March 15, 2001.
The Does New Research Lend Credence to Recovered Memory Theory? by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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