Eyewitness and Repressed Memories

Modified: 2024-07-07 5:40 AM CDST

• Psychologists have long demonstrated the fallibility of eyewitness testimony.
  • A famous example is when someone enters the classroom and appears to shoot the professor, then runs off.
  • The professor then pops up and asks the class to write down everything they saw and heard. The eyewitness accounts never agree. (For obvious ethical and safety reasons, this kind of demonstration should no longer be conducted.)

• Elizabeth Loftus has conducted a long series of studies on eyewitness testimony.
  • She has described how, after repeated and leading questioning, eyewitness accounts become more and more detailed.
  • Further, as more questions are asked, eyewitnesses become more and more convinced of the truthfulness of their answers.
  • However, her experiments show that what many subjects (around 20%) are remembering is not the event itself but the questions about the event.
• Another related and controversial topic is repressed testimony.
  • Many states have passed laws allowing criminal proceedings to occur on the basis of repressed testimony.
  • Repressed testimony occurs when someone "remembers" an event that occurred in the past and that had been locked up for a long time.
    • Typical examples include childhood memories of sexual abuse or of witnessing traumatic events.
  • There is still a great deal of controversy about whether repressed memories are truly memories or artifacts.
    • Loftus has succeeded in creating completely false memories in subjects by embedding false information within a larger story that is completely true (except for the one falsehood).
    • Participants, during debriefing, are shocked to learn that their memories are not true.
    • Interestingly, subjects' accounts of the false memories contain significantly fewer words than their accounts of true memories.
      • Perhaps in recognition of Loftus's research, the American Medical Association now holds that accounts of repressed memories in therapy should not be accepted at face value.
  • The controversy continues to the present day. A 2013 study found that a majority of clinicians surveyed, while less accepting of the concept than in the past, still believe in the reality of repressed memories and that they should be treated in therapy. In contrast, fewer than 30% of research psychologists surveyed believed that repressed memories were real.
  • The American Psychological Association defined the phenomenon thusly in 2018, a recovered memory is:
    • the subjective experience of recalling a prior traumatic event, such as sexual or physical abuse, that has previously been unavailable to conscious recollection. Before recovering the memory, the person may be unaware that the traumatic event occurred. The existence of the phenomenon is controversial, particularly in the area of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Because such recoveries may occur while the person is undergoing therapy, there is debate about the role that the therapist may have in suggesting or otherwise arousing them. Also called repressed memory.