Citation

Clancy SA, McNally RJ, Schacter DL. J. Trauma. Stress 1999; 12(4): 559-569.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1999, International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1023/A:1024704815234

PMID

10646176

Abstract

We tested whether having participants imagine unusual childhood events inflates their confidence that these events happened to them, and tested whether this effect is greater in women who report recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse than in women who do not. Participants were pretested on how confident they were that certain childhood events had happened to them before being asked to imagine some of these events in the laboratory. New confidence measures were readministered. Although guided imagery did not significantly inflate confidence that early childhood events had occurred in either group, the effect size of inflated confidence was more than twice as large in the control group as in the group with recovered memory. These data suggest that individuals can counteract memory distortions potentially associated with guided imagery, at least under some conditions.

Language: en