Clinical characteristics of adults reporting repressed, recovered, or continuous memories of childhood sexual abuse.

The authors assessed women and men who either reported continuous memories of their childhood sexual abuse (CSA, n = 92), reported recovering memories of CSA (n = 38), reported believing they harbored repressed memories of CSA (n = 42), or reported never having been sexually abused (n = 36). Men and women were indistinguishable on all clinical and psychometric measures. The 3 groups that reported abuse scored similarly on measures of anxiety, depression, dissociation, and absorption. These groups also scored higher than the control group. Inconsistent with betrayal trauma theory, recovered memory participants were not more likely to report abuse by a parent or stepparent than were continuous memory participants. Rates of depression and posttraumatic stress disorder did not differ between the continuous and recovered memory groups.

Autobiographical memory specificity in adults reporting repressed, recovered, or continuous memories of childhood sexual abuse.

Some psychotherapists believe that adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) are characterised by memory deficits for their childhood. Using the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT), we asked nonabused control participants and participants who reported either continuous, recovered, or repressed memories of CSA to retrieve a specific personal memory in response to either positive or negative cue words from either childhood or adolescence/adulthood. The results indicated that participants who believed they harboured repressed memories of abuse tended to exhibit the greatest difficulty retrieving specific memories from their childhood. Neither posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) nor major depression was related to diminished memory specificity.

Sleep paralysis, sexual abuse, and space alien abduction.

Sleep paralysis accompanied by hypnopompic ('upon awakening') hallucinations is an often-frightening manifestation of discordance between the cognitive/perceptual and motor aspects of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Awakening sleepers become aware of an inability to move, and sometimes experience intrusion of dream mentation into waking consciousness (e.g. seeing intruders in the bedroom). In this article, we summarize two studies. In the first study, we assessed 10 individuals who reported abduction by space aliens and whose claims were linked to apparent episodes of sleep paralysis during which hypnopompic hallucinations were interpreted as alien beings. In the second study, adults reporting repressed, recovered, or continuous memories of childhood sexual abuse more often reported sleep paralysis than did a control group. Among the 31 reporting sleep paralysis, only one person linked it to abuse memories. This person was among the six recovered memory participants who reported sleep paralysis (i.e. 17% rate of interpreting it as abuse-related). People rely on personally plausible cultural narratives to interpret these otherwise baffling sleep paralysis episodes.

Sleep paralysis in adults reporting repressed, recovered, or continuous memories of childhood sexual abuse.

Sleep paralysis typically occurs as individuals awaken from rapid eye movement sleep before motor paralysis wanes. Many episodes are accompanied by tactile and visual hallucinations, often of threatening intruders in the bedroom. Pendergrast [Victims of Memory: Incest Accusations and Shattered Lives, HarperCollins, London, 1996] proposed that individuals who report repressed or recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) may misinterpret episodes of sleep paralysis as reemerging fragments of dissociated ("repressed") memories of CSA. To investigate this issue, we administered a sleep paralysis questionnaire to people reporting either repressed (n = 18), recovered (n = 14), or continuous (n = 36) memories of CSA, or to a control group reporting no history of CSA (n = 16). The prevalence of sleep paralysis was: repressed memory group (44%), recovered memory group (43%), continuous memory group (47%), and control group (13%). Among the six individuals in the recovered memory group who had experienced sleep paralysis, one interpreted it as related to sexual abuse (i.e., a rate of 17%). All other participants who had reported sleep paralysis embraced other interpretations (e.g., saw a ghost). Dissociation and depressive symptoms were more common among those who had experienced sleep paralysis than among those who denied having experienced it.

Reality monitoring in adults reporting repressed, recovered, or continuous memories of childhood sexual abuse.

People who report either repressed or recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) may have deficits in reality monitoring--the process whereby one discriminates memories of percepts from memories of images. Using signal detection methods, the authors found that adults reporting either repressed or recovered memories of CSA were less able to discriminate between words they had seen from words they had imagined seeing than were adults reporting either never having forgotten their CSA or adults reporting no history of CSA. Relative deficits in the ability to discriminate percepts from images (i.e., low d') were apparent on only some tests. The groups did not differ in their criterion--response bias--for affirming having seen versus imagined stimuli.

Psychophysiological responding during script-driven imagery in people reporting abduction by space aliens.

Is recollection of highly improbable traumatic experiences accompanied by psychophysiological responses indicative of intense emotion? To investigate this issue, we measured heart rate, skin conductance, and left lateral frontalis electromyographic responses in individuals who reported having been abducted by space aliens. Recordings of these participants were made during script-driven imagery of their reported alien encounters and of other stressful, positive, and neutral experiences they reported. We also measured the psychophysiological responses of control participants while they heard the scripts of the abductees. We predicted that if "memories" of alien abduction function like highly stressful memories, then psychophysiological reactivity to the abduction and stressful scripts would be greater than reactivity to the positive and neutral scripts, and this effect would be more pronounced among abductees than among control participants. Contrast analyses confirmed this prediction for all three physiological measures (ps < .05). Therefore, belief that one has been traumatized may generate emotional responses similar to those provoked by recollection of trauma (e.g., combat).

Memory distortion in people reporting abduction by aliens.

False memory creation was examined in people who reported having recovered memories of traumatic events that are unlikely to have occurred: abduction by space aliens. A variant of the Deese/Roediger-McDermott paradigm (J. Deese. 1959; H. L. Roediger III & K. B. McDermott, 1995) was used to examine false recall and false recognition in 3 groups: people reporting recovered memories of alien abduction. people who believe they were abducted by aliens but have no memories, and people who deny having been abducted by aliens. Those reporting recovered and repressed memories of alien abduction were more prone than control participants to exhibit false recall and recognition. The groups did not differ in correct recall or recognition. Hypnotic suggestibility, depressive symptoms, and schizotypic features were significant predictors of false recall and false recognition.