False memories in women with self-reported childhood sexual abuse: an empirical study.

Although controversy exists about the validity of memories of childhood abuse, little is known about memory function in individuals reporting childhood abuse. This study assessed memories for previously presented words, including the capacity for false memory of critical lures not actually present in the word list, in 63 subjects, including abused women with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), abused women without PTSD, and men and women without abuse or PTSD. Abused women with PTSD had a higher frequency of false recognition memory of critical lures (95%) than abused women without PTSD (78%), nonabused women without PTSD (79%), or nonabused men without PTSD (86%). PTSD women also showed poorer memory for studied words and increased insertions of non-studied words other than critical lures. These findings are consistent with a broad range of memory alterations in abused women with PTSD.

Dissociations and dissociation theory in hypnosis: comment on Kirsch and Lynn (1998)

I. Kirsch and S. J. Lynn's (1998) critique of the neodissociation theory of divided consciousness fails to consider evidence of dissociations between explicit and implicit memory and perception in hypnosis. Contrary to their conclusions, evidence that the rate of hidden observer response (like other hypnotic responses) varies with the wording of instructions does not contradict neodissociation theory; rather, it underscores the fact that hypnosis entails social interaction as well as alterations in conscious awareness. Neodissociation and sociocognitive theories of hypnosis complement each other. Each draws attention to aspects of the experience of hypnosis that the other neglects.

Attributions, awareness, and dissociation: in memoriam Kenneth S. Bowers, 1937-1996.

Research by Kenneth S. Bowers on posthypnotic suggestion, positive hallucinations, hypnotic analgesia, and posthypnotic amnesia is reviewed, along with his nonhypnotic research on the person-by-situation interaction and on intuition in problem solving. Bowers's intellectual style, serious curiosity, is offered as a model for hypnosis research.

On bridging the gap between social-personality psychology and neuropsychology.

Although cognitive psychology has learned much from the study of patients with neuropsychological impairments, social and personality psychologists have been slow to do the same. In this article we argue that the domain of clinical neuropsychology holds considerable untapped potential for formulating and testing models within social and personality; psychology and describe some of the ways in which questions of interest to social and personality psychologists can be addressed with neuropsychological data. Examples are drawn from a variety of neuropsychological syndromes, including amnesia, autism, anosognosia, commissurotomy, frontal lobe damage, and prosopagnosia. We conclude that consideration of the personal and social lives of patients with neuropsychological impairments ultimately will lead to a richer understanding of the person, one that bridges the gap between social and cognitive levels of analysis.

Convergence in understanding hypnosis? Perhaps, but perhaps not quite so fast.

The study of hypnosis has been plagued by conflict. Although a more recent trend has been the search for convergence among disparate points of view, two highly salient issues remain contentious: the question of whether hypnosis involves alterations in consciousness, and the nature and correlates of individual differences in hypnotic response. Theoretical convergence is a laudable goal, but not at the expense of obscuring the complexity of hypnosis as a state of altered consciousness, a cognitive skill, and a social interaction. Perhaps the best prescription for convergence in hypnosis is the cautious conviction advocated by Kenneth S. Bowers and so clearly exemplified in his own research.

Hypnosis, memory and amnesia.

Hypnotized subjects respond to suggestions from the hypnotist for imaginative experiences involving alterations in perception and memory. Individual differences in hypnotizability are only weakly related to other forms of suggestibility. Neuropsychological speculations about hypnosis focus on the right hemisphere and/or the frontal lobes. Posthypnotic amnesia refers to subjects' difficulty in remembering, after hypnosis, the events and experiences that transpired while they were hypnotized. Posthypnotic amnesia is not an instance of state-dependent memory, but it does seem to involve a disruption of retrieval processes similar to the functional amnesias observed in clinical dissociative disorders. Implicit memory, however, is largely spared, and may underlie subjects' ability to recognize events that they cannot recall. Hypnotic hypermnesia refers to improved memory for past events. However, such improvements are illusory: hypermnesia suggestions increase false recollection, as well as subjects' confidence in both true and false memories. Hypnotic age regression can be subjectively compelling, but does not involve the ablation of adult memory, or the reinstatement of childlike modes of mental functioning, or the revivification of memory. The clinical and forensic use of hypermnesia and age regression to enhance memory in patients, victims and witnesses (e.g. recovered memory therapy for child sexual abuse) should be discouraged.

Is there implicit memory after propofol sedation?

Recent evidence indicates that implicit memory may be preserved during general anaesthesia. We tested for the presence of explicit and implicit memory in patients undergoing surgical procedures with local or regional anaesthesia and sedation with propofol. Initial i.v. boluses of propofol 0.5 mg kg-1 and fentanyl 1 microgram kg-1 were administered, followed by an infusion of propofol 50 micrograms kg-1 min-1. Administration of one or more doses of propofol 30 mg i.v. during operation was controlled either by the patient or the anaesthetist. At the start of the last skin stitch, patients were presented with a list of 15 stimulus words and the most frequently associated response. The infusion was then discontinued. After 1 h in the recovery area, all patients were tested for free recall, free association, cued recall and recognition on the list presented during surgery (critical list) and a matched list not presented (neutral list). Data of all patients without free recall (explicit memory) were analysed with repeated-measures analysis of variance. Of 36 patients, five demonstrated free recall. For the remaining 31 patients, cued recall and recognition showed no evidence of explicit memory. However, the free association tests demonstrated significant priming. The mean number of critical free associations was 6.6 (SEM 0.4) compared with 5.5 (0.4) neutral free association (P < 0.05). In the absence of explicit memory, implicit memory persists after intraoperative sedation with propofol.

Memory and consciousness: an appreciation of Claparède and recognition et moiïtè.

Claparède's report of a case of amnesic syndrome is an early example of the cognitive neuropsychology paradigm, by which studies of brain-damaged patients are used to shed light on the nature of normal mental processes. The case illustrates the selective impairment of episodic memory, with procedural and semantic memory remaining intact. Moreover, the several demonstrations of preserved learning during amnesia comprise an early illustration of the dissociation between explicit and implicit memory. However, its greatest contemporary relevance is for theories of conscious recollection. Claparède underscored the role of the self, viewed as a knowledge structure, in conscious mental life, and he drew attention to three different modes of recognition: remembering, inferring, and knowing.

Abnormal eating and dissociative experiences: a further study of college women.

A total of 241 female college students completed the Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI) and a battery of other scales measuring tendencies toward psychopathology. Both abnormal eating and ego dysfunction were most strongly associated with depression; lower correlations were obtained with dissociation, fears, obsessions and compulsions, perceptual aberration, and magical ideation. Panic disorder was associated with abnormal eating but not ego dysfunction. There appears to be no specific association between eating disorder and dissociation.

Abnormal eating and dissociative experiences.

A total of 656 male and female college students completed the Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI) and a modified version of the Dissociative Experiences Scale (M-DES). There were significant correlations between dissociative experiences and each of the EDI subscales, especially for women. Even among women, however, dissociation was more strongly related to aspects of ego dysfunction than to abnormal eating per se. This finding sets limits on the hypothesized association between dissociative disorder and eating disorder.

The trauma-memory argument.

The trauma-memory argument proposes that memories of childhood trauma can affect adult behavior outside awareness and that such unconscious memories can return to awareness even after long delays. Unfortunately, this conclusion is based on case reports of unknown representativeness and on clinical studies which are methodologically flawed or do not consider alternative explanations. Of particular concern is the general lack of independent verification of the ostensibly forgotten memories. The trauma-memory argument is plausible, in at least some respects, given what we know about the processes of remembering and forgetting, but considerably more research is needed before it can serve as a basis for scientifically sound clinical practice.

Hypnotizability and mental imagery.

Two studies investigated the relationship between mental imagery and hypnotizability, with the imagery measures administered in a hypnotic context. The correlation of hypnotizability with vividness of imagery was significant in one study, but not in the other; both correlations were significantly lower than that obtained between hypnotizability and absorption, assessed in the same samples. The correlations with control of visual imagery, and with various measures of the vividness of motor imagery, were even lower and rarely significant. Except for an aggregate index of motor imagery, a search for significant nonlinear relationships with hypnotizability yielded nothing that was consistent across studies. Future studies of imagery and hypnotizability should make use of better measures of vividness of mental imagery and consider the relevance of aspects of imagery other than vividness.

Priming and recognition in ECT-induced amnesia.

Priming and recognition were tested in patients receiving electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for treatment of a psychiatric disorder. Patients studied a list of words just prior to ECT and then received memory tests for those words after recovering from ECT. Stem-cued recall was poor (retrograde amnesia), but priming on word-stem completion was preserved. Recognition was poor on a "high-criterion" test requiring a retrieval-based judgment but partially intact on a "low-criterion" test requiring a familiarity-based judgment. The results support the familiarity-retrieval distinction in two-component theories of recognition and suggest that signal detection measures of sensitivity are not wholly independent of response criteria.

Commentary: psychodynamics and social cognition--notes on the fusion of psychoanalysis and psychology.

Interest in linking psychoanalysis with scientific psychology waxes and wanes. In part, the difficulties have been caused by the preference of psychoanalysts for Freud's clinical theory (and its emphasis on narrative truth) as opposed to his metapsychology (with its requirement for historical truth). Even though contemporary scientific psychology evolved largely independently of psychoanalysis, the articles on object relations, transference, and defense published in this special issue show that the theory remains a source of inspiration, observations, and hypotheses.

Hypnosis, delayed recall, and the principles of memory.

This article reviews the seven principles of memory function that set limits on the degree to which any attempt to recover a long-forgotten memory can succeed: encoding, organization, time dependency, cue dependency, encoding specificity, schematic processing, and reconstruction. In the absence of independent corroboration, there is no "litmus test" that can reliably distinguish true from false memories, or memories that are based on perception from those that are based on imagination. Practicing clinicians should exercise great caution when using hypnosis or any other technique to facilitate delayed recall.

Source memory: extending the boundaries of age-related deficits.

Previous research has established that elderly adults can exhibit impaired memory for the source of newly acquired facts even when levels of fact recall in old and young do not differ. However, source memory impairments have been observed only under conditions of many-to-1 mapping: A large number of facts are related to either of 2 sources. It is thus possible that apparent source memory impairments reflect a more general age-related problem in handling many-to-1 mappings. Two experiments provide evidence against this possibility by demonstrating age-related source memory deficits with 1-to-1 mapping between facts and sources. The data also indicate that source memory deficits are observed across encoding tasks that manipulate the allocation of attention to the source or to the fact.