CSA- childhood sexual abuse

Purpose: To examine false recognition in four groups of women: recovered group reports of recovered memories of CSA, repressed- women feeling they had been victims of CSA but had no memories, continuous-memory- women who were victims of CSA and have memories for it, and women with no history of CSA (control group).

Hypotheses: 1) Recovered memory group will have more false recognition instances than other groups. (Due to Evidence that higher DES scores correlate with recovered memory subjects and these scores predict distortion in DRM paradigm)

2) The question: "whether recovered memory groups are able to suppress their proneness to exhibit false recognition"

Method

Women from each group were given 12 lists, each with a common theme (critical lure)

One was given then a recognition test on the list was given, this being the process for each list.

4 lists contained 15 semantic association words, 4 contained 8 words, and 4 contained 2 words.

Each word appeared on a screen for 3s in test, and during recognition test words stayed on the screen until subject responded "new" or "remember" to the word.

Recognition test contained 12 items; 6 studied items, 6 non-studied items, one of which being the critical lure.

Results/Discussion

False recognition

For the 8 list and when the 8 and 15 list were combined, hypothesis was confirmed.

Suppression

Recovered and repressed group subjects were more likely to suppress false recognition over the duration of the experiment.

DES scores correlated with false recognition occurrence r= .32 p= .01

Therefore, women in the recovered memory group were more likely than women in the other groups to show false recognition of semantic associates.

Both recovered and repressed groups showed suppression of false recognition as experiment continued.