False Memories In Psychology

Each of the authors is of a psychological background in education, and their credentials are a positive sign in this topic. They considered that age could be a definitive factor in whether or not a person remembers their abuse, and stated that in a study it was found that people abused in ages 3-5 likely would not recall it at a later date. In the second article, “Repressed Memories: True and False”, there was another authority on the subject, author Andrew D. Reisner. Reisner’s view was that recovered memories could be accurate. Though, he also states that the theory that repressed memories themselves may not actually exist is extreme and unjustified. He says that while he believes memories can be repressed and recalled, there is a risk of false

Throughout this entire week, I have come to learn that memories are reconstructed when we remember them; however, this doesn’t make them fake, they are indeed real in my opinion. This is also my opinion on repressed memories. Repressed memories are real. Therapies in which therapist continue to suggest there’s “something else” (Loftus) are the reason why people doubt the authenticity of repressed memories. In the video False Memories, the study showing how subjectable people are to formulating false memories is astonishing and it proves just how easy it is to create fake memories. I believe that suggestibility is the main cause behind constructed/fake memories: Paul McHugh made it very clear in Can Trama Hid in the Back of the Mind?” to remind people that certain types of therapies (hypnosis and drugs) can make a person more susceptible. “Some contemporary therapists have been known to tell

Going to the article again and to our book, I do agree with points expressing that how repressed memories can also be false memories that are just making monsters by the active imagination. There are some cases of repressed memories that lead to false accusations and might destroy someone’s reputation and ruin their

Majority people believe our human memory is like a videotape recorder, record everything what had happened accurately and can play it back over and over again. But actually it’s not. Our memories can be contaminated by others or our past memory and come up with false memory which called misinformation effect. The story of Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton shows a great example of memory failure.

A humans memory contains all that they have learnt and all they have experienced. Memories allow moments of today and yesterday last tomorrow and forever. It may seem that memories are a reliable source of information for a large majority of individuals but what would they think if their memories were actually wrong? To realize the memories that have been held in their minds for so long are inaccurate would cause great confusion and denial, which is the exact effect it has on them. Several people truly believe the reason why such a significant amount of others along with themselves have false memories is The Mandela Effect. The Mandela Effect is a conspiracy theory which focuses on parallel universes not only existing but also intertwining

It is unlikely that social consequences of false memories can be avoided. Elizabeth Loftus was intrigued to study false memories, and is perhaps personally responsible for subsequent developments throughout the history of false memories. Some of this history addresses various theories aimed at isolating how or why false memories occur. These include Source Monitoring Framework, Activation Monitoring Theory, Fuzzy Trace Theory, and strategies for persuasion which can lead to the development of false memory. Such persuasion leads to the present discussion concerning how persuasion in the judicial system has created false confessions and wrongful eyewitness testimonies, due to the Misinformation Effect. Additionally, Recovered Memory Therapy psychotherapy, a method used to reclaim lost memories, reveals itself as problematic where false memories are concerned.

An increasingly conspicuous phenomenon is the Mandela Effect. It relates directly to confabulation, which is defined as a disturbance in memory, without the consciences’ intention to deceive. This means that someone can remember something to be a certain way and be very intent in it’s truth, but in reality the memory is incorrect. For example, the majority of society remembers the popular children book series being titled ‘Berenstein Bears’. If you look back at the books, they are actually titled ‘Berenstain Bears’, which many people don’t recall it ever being called. While our brains do make errors, the Mandela Effect addresses a large group of people all having identical memories but they are incorrect. This causes a confusion in society. So many people remember something the same way, but it is not the truth. Because of this problem, reality seems to be distorted and the accuracy of our brains is in question. The Mandela Effect makes it impossible for us to trust our societal brain.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Bless Me, Ultima are stories told to us years after the fact. In Yunior’s case, enough time has passed for his ex-girlfriend Lola to have borne a daughter by another man. And Lola’s daughter is old enough for Yunior to be able to observe how she has “her mother’s [strong] legs.”

1. Flashbulb memories are very detailed and vivid reconstructive memories that are usually linked with emotion and last a lifetime. Originally, flashbulb memories were thought to be very accurate and uneasily forgotten. One of the first studies ever done on flashbulb memories was Brown and Kulik (1977). They wanted to investigate if flashbulb memories were as accurate as everyone hypothesized they were. They had 80 participants in their study. Each participant was asked to recall memories that were linked to a shocking event. The results were that participants were able to recall the memories vividly and with much detail. Memories that were linked with a high level of emotion such as the assassination of JFK or a death of a relative caused

But it is difficult to evaluate these findings because it changed from a person to another and it also could be a lie of the person if there was no witness. Another important factor is the therapist who always raised the issue of sexual abuse or traumatic situation during the treatment, he maybe wanted to confirm his beliefs instead of providing the real memory. Thus, this treatment could create a “false memories” which did not exist in people’s life story. In conclusion, the repressed memory is very complex and controversial. People find more difficult to find out the root of this edge cutting issue (Loftus,

Sources of details that could affect memory include books, therapists’ suggestions and accounts, client accounts, litigation accounts and taped interviews. The book The Courage to Heal suggests to its readers that if they cannot account for a certain time in their lives there is a great chance that they are repressing memories. It goes to the extent of suggesting ways of retrieving these memories. The way that the repression of memories is presented in this book is suggestive that almost everyone has gone through an abusive childhood in their lives and are repressing their memories. Secret Survivors goes on to list possible symptoms of signs that one has repressed memories. Therapists play a crucial role in making their clients believe that they are victims of incest or satanic ritual activities depending on symptoms like depression, low self-esteem, anxiety, etc. or by suggesting that their clients’ symptoms are likened to those that have experienced incest or satanic ritual activities in their childhood. Clients’ accounts are mostly based on what the therapists suggest to them. An attorney called Greg Zimmerman went for therapy to deal with his father’s suicidal death and there he was repeatedly and suggestively told that he had repressed memories of satanic ritualistic abuse which led him to the pursuit of uncovering these repressed memories which might never have been there to begin with. Litigations accounts include the case of a daughter who accused her father of incest crimes after attending about 30 sessions with her therapist to uncover these memories. She claimed to have memories of her father abusing her from the time that she was 7 months old. Although her father compensated her for the accusations she placed on him, he sternly denied having abused his daughter. Taped interviews played a role in proving that a man accused of sexually abusing his daughter was suggestively told

Sigmund Freud, perhaps the most famous psychologist in the history of the field, introduced an idea in the late nineteenth century that continues to be contentiously debated: memory repression. A repressed, or recovered memory, can be defined as one which is suppressed, making it inaccessible to the conscious mind, and must be recovered by therapeutic techniques. Since Freud’s time, of course, there have been many more technically advanced analyses of memory and their repression, and these studies have introduced the idea of false memories, which are memories of experiences that occurred much differently than the individual recalls or did not even occur at all. Comparing studies performed by cognitive researchers on recovered memories and false

False memory syndrome in 1986, Nadean Cool a nurse’s aide in Wisconsin sought therapy from a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist used hypnosis and other suggestive techniques to dig out buried (false) memories of abuse. When cool finally realize that false memory has been implanted she sued the psychiatrist for malpractice and her case was settled out for court for 2.4 million dollars (Loftus, 1997). In Missouri, a church counsellor helped Beth Rutherford to remember during therapy that her father, a clergyman had regularly raped her between the ages of 7 and 14. Under her therapist’s guidance, Rutherford developed memories of her father twice impregnating her and forcing her to abort the fetus herself with coat

In “Do Cognitive Interview Instructions Contribute To False Beliefs And Memories?”, the two authors, Stefanie J. Sharman and Martine B. Powell discuss about a research study that took place over a span of fifteen years. The purpose of this study was to see if exposing people to cognitive interview could create false beliefs and/or false memories. In this study, the participants participated in 3 sessions receiving different instruction pertaining to how they will receive information. In the first session, they were asked to make four ratings out of ten childhood events, followed with the rating of how probable the even was for the overall person in general and a rating of their confidence about that experience they had before the age of 10;

The article was based off a team effort of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and University of Cambridge Behavioral and Clinical Neuroscience base out of Cambridge England did a study try to examine how suppression affect a memory’s unconscious influence people. The research study focused on suppression of visual memories. Researchers first believed that majority of trauma had a visual aspect (University of Cambridge, 2014). That most people who have some type of traumatic experiences like military war or some detrimental close encounter visualizes traumatic experience. That these fortunate circumstances had been imbedded in their psyche and with something so traumatic they will never forget the