Ost, J., Foster, S., Costall, A., & Bull, R. (2005) False reports of childhood events in appropriate interviews. Memory, 13 (7), 700-710.
The parental misinformation paradigm is a technique of studying the accuract of reports of childhood memories and involves contacting a participant’s parent’s prior to the study in order to obtain details of events which happened during the participant’s childhood. The experimenters then present the participants with a true or false memory of the past and check to see how well they will remember or “misremember” the event. In the past, experimenters have used “memory recovery” techniques in order to promote the recovery of memories more easily. These included guided imagery and journaling. This experiment did not use the techniques, however, and actually wanted to examine what the “baseline” of false memories would be without them. The experimenters also wanted to see what role social pressure, individual differences (as measured by the Dissociative Experiences Scale, the Self Monitoring scale, and the Gudjonsson Compliance Scale,) and the participant’s confidence in the sorce of misinformation had on the false memories.
Procedure:
The participant’s parents were contacted and they provided information on an event that did occur in the participant’s life. The experimenters made up a false event for each participant.
Interview session1:
The interviewer was blind to which event was true and which was false for each participant and also had been trained in appropriate interviewing techniques. Furing the first interview the interviewer read an orienting statement to the pariticcipant and then asked them to freely recall details of the event. The interviewer also used a series of prompts to help the participant remember. After the participant had freely recalled all that they remembered they were told not to discuss the event in question with their parents and werere scheduled for a second appointment a week later.
Interview session 2:
The procedure for the second interview session was identical to the first except that the participants were asked whether they had spoken with their parent’s about thte event in question. The participants were again asked to freely recall information about the event and then allowed to go after being reminded not to speak to their parents about the event.
A final interview was scheduled a week later
Interview session 3:
The procedure for the third interview was the same as the first two, but after the interview ended the participants were asked to complete a questionnaire about how pressured they felt to recall the event, how confident they were in their recall, and how confident they were in the paren’t account of the event. The participants then completed the Gudjonsson Compliance Scale the Dissociative Experiences Scale, and the Self Monitoring scale.
After all interviews took place, independent judges rated the social pressure of the interviews.
Results:
In the true report 64.5% of participants gave a full report of the vent, 19.4% gave a partial report, and 16.1% have no report. In the experimenter created event only 3% gave a full report, 19.4% gave a partial report, and 77.4% gave no report. Independent judges ratings of the social pressure of the interview was relatively low, which is in contrast to the perceived social pressure of the participant who reported higher levels of pressure. Whith regard to the personality variables, the Dissociative Experiences Scale’s results correlate with the particcipant’s level of recall for experimenter created events. With the Self-Monitoring scale the participant’s scores had a negative correlation with the rates of false recall and with the Gudjonsson Compliance Scale there was no relationship. Overall, the participant’s confidence in the true events was significantly higher than in the false events. Also, the participants were more confident in their parent’s recall of both events.
Discussion:
Though there have been concerns that therapists might be causing the “false” memories of child sexual abuse, this study found that, though ratings of social pressure were low, the incidence of false reports was still relatively high (22.6%). The writers of the report hypothesize that social pressure, individual differences, and participant’s confidence in the source of misleading information might be the culprit. The researchers recommend follow up research into these categories.
Important Legal
Disclaimer: The preceding are articles we read together in the Lampinen Lab Spring 2006 false memory reading group. By
clicking on the button next to the article you can see the summary of that
article. The summary was prepared by the student presenting that article and it
is of course the case that the views expressed in the summary do not
necessarily represent the views of the reading group as a whole, Dr. Lampinen, the Lampinen Lab,
Hugo's, the University of Arkansas, the Razorback Football or Basketball teams
(although we're not sure about cross country), people living down the street
from us, Bob Dylan, Jack Fate, our extended families, or anyone else for that
matter except for the student who wrote the summary (and they don't necessarily
believe what they wrote either).