I. Introduction
In America, many women (about 16%) self-reported childhood sexual abuses and those can sometimes lead to psychiatric disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD). However, there is also a large controversy about the validity of memories for childhood abuse since memory can be susceptible to insertions, deletions or distortions, and studies showed that when those phenomena occurred, the subjects remained convinced of the validity of their memories.
The DRM paradigm is one of the ways to show such memory distortions. Most experiments using this procedure were conducted with normal young adult subjects (except a few experiments involving older people, amnesic patients…).
The aim of the present experiment is to study the performance of subjects who self-reported abuse in childhood. In a previous study (Clancy and al., 2000), women with self-reported abuses showed high levels of false recognition of the critical lures.
II Method
The present study was designed to assess memory function (recall and recognition of studied words as well as the capacity for false memories) in women with self-reported sexual childhood abuse. In addition, since reported sexual abuse can sometimes lead to psychiatric disorders such as PTSD (Kessler and al., 1995) and PTSD has been associated with a wide range of memory disorders, the authors will compare the performance of women who self-reported childhood sexual abuse with (23 subjects) or without diagnosis of PTSD (13 subjects). Finally, those groups will be compared to control groups consisting of men (11 subjects) or women (16 subjects) without any reported abuse or PTSD diagnosis.
After a brief conversation, they received a recognition memory test in which they had to circle the words they’ve seen before and assign a confidence rating range from 1 (definitely new) to 4 (definitely old).
This included 12 studied words and 30 unstudied words (6 critical lures, 12 words unrelated, 12 words weakly related to the words in the lists).
III. Results
In Recall: (see table 2)
PTSD group recalled fewer items than the other groups. All the groups made similar rates of false memories. And PTSD group made more intrusions other than the critical lure than the abused group without PTSD and the control men group (but there was no differences between the PTSD group and the control Women group!!)
In Recognition: (see table 3)
There were no differences between groups for the studied items but PTSD group recognized more critical lures than the other groups. In addition, as in recall, for the unstudied words other than the lure, there was a difference between PTSD and the other groups except the control woman group (but they didn’t say if there was a difference between unrelated and weakly related distractors!). However, when they examined the specificity of false recognition by subtracting false recognition of non studied items to false recognition of the critical lure, they obtained a difference between PTSD and control woman that was almost significant (p= .08).
Overall, there was a negative correlation between correct recall of studied words and false recognition of the critical lure. That is, the more you recall correct items the less you recognize the critical lures. But this strong correlation was found in all groups except the PTSD group!
- Relationship between false recall and clinical variables
Higher levels of PTSD were associated with poorer memory but there was no relationship with false memories. No relationship were neither found between dissociation scales (DES, CADSS) or general psychiatric symptoms (BSI) and false memories in any group.
IV. Discussion
As shown in other studies, PTSD was here associated with a wide range of memory alterations with PTSD women recalling less studied items and recognizing more critical lures and other unstudied words than the other groups. Those deficits can be related either to stress-induced deficits in the hippocampus (Bremner, 1998) or related to prefrontal cortical disfunction. However, although symptoms of dissociative amnesia are also characteristics of PTSD, no correlation were found between false memories and dissociate scales.
Their conclusion is that they do not question the validity of self-reported childhood sexual abuses but emphasized the fact that women who reported those abuses and developed PTSD have a wide range of alteration in memory function.
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