title: "Amnesia" for summer camps and high school graduation: memory work increases reports of prior periods of remembering less.
abstract: Claims regarding amnesia for childhood sexual abuse have often been based on studies of adults' responses to questions of the form, "Was there ever a period of time when you remembered less of the abuse than you do now?" In this experiment, 43 adult (mean age = 42) participants rated their current and prior memories of several nontraumatic childhood/adolescent events. Reports of prior periods of less memory were fairly common. Participants then engaged in "reminiscence" or "enhanced" retrieval activities directed toward remembering more about a selected target event. Following retrieval, 35% of the reminiscence condition participants reported prior poor memory for the target event, as did 70% of the enhanced condition. These results highlight the need for appropriate control conditions in retrospective studies of amnesia for childhood trauma.
authors.affiliation: University of Lethbridge, Canada. jdread@uvic.ca
authors.forename: J D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Read
authors.forename: D S
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Lindsay
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000647:Amnesia / Q000523:psychology*; D002165:Camping / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D002650:Child Abuse, Sexual / Q000523:psychology; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008016:Life Change Events; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D009042:Motivation