http cogprints soton ac uk documents disk0 00 00 05 97 cog00 Loftus Elizabeth 1997 Creating False Memories Scientific American 277 70 75 Copyright Scientific American 1997 Please note that a Word 6 document of this paper complete with photographs and cartoons can be found at http www vuw ac nz psyc garry psyc322 readings html CREATING FALSE MEMORIES by Elizabeth F Loftus Bullet Researchers are showing how suggestion and imagination can be used to create memories of events that did not actually occur In 1986 Nadean Cool a nurse s aide in Wisconsin sought therapy from a psychiatrist to help her cope with her reaction to a traumatic event experienced by her daughter During therapy the psychiatrist used hypnosis and other suggestive techniques to dig out buried memories of abuse that Cool herself had allegedly experienced In the process Cool became convinced that she had repressed memories of having been in a satanic cult eating babies of being raped of having sex with animals and of being forced to watch the murder of her eight year old friend She came to believe that she had over 120 personalities children adults angels and even a duck all because Cool was told she had experienced severe childhood sexual and physical abuse The psychiatrist also performed exorcisms on her one of which lasted for five hours and included the sprinkling of holy water and screams for Satan to leave Cool s body When Cool finally realized that false memories had been planted she sued the psychiatrist for malpractice In March 1997 after five weeks of trial her case was settled out of court for 2 4 million dollars Nadean Cool is not the only patient to develop false memories as a result of questionable therapy In Missouri a church counselor helped Beth Rutherford to remember during therapy that her father a clergyman had regularly raped her between the ages of seven and l4 and that her mother sometimes helped him by holding her down Under her therapist s guidance Rutherford developed memories of her father twice impregnating her and forcing her to abort the fetus herself with a coat hanger The father had to resign from his post as a clergyman when the allegations were made public Later medical examination of their daughter revealed however that she was still a virgin at age 22 and had never been pregnant The daughter sued the therapist and received a l million settlement in 1996 About a year earlier two juries returned verdicts against a Minnesota psychiatrist accused of planting false memories by former patients Vynnette Hammane and Elizabeth Carlson who under hypnosis and sodium amytal and after being fed misinformation about the workings of memory had come to remember horrific abuse by family members The juries awarded Hammane 2 67 million and Carlson 2 5 million for their ordeals In all four cases the women developed memories about childhood abuse in therapy and then later denied their authenticity How can we determine if memories of childhood abuse are true or false 1 of 6 6 24 02 5 19 PM http cogprints soton ac uk documents disk0 00 00 05 97 cog00 Without corroboration it is very difficult to differentiate between false memories and true ones Also in these cases some memories are contrary to physical evidence such as explicit and detailed memories of rape and abortion when medical examination confirmed virginity How is it possible for people to acquire elaborate and confident false memories A growing number of investigations demonstrate that under the right circumstances false memories can be instilled rather easily in some people My own research into memory distortion goes back to the early l970s when I began studies of the misinformation effect These studies show that when people who witness an event are later exposed to new and misleading information about it their recollections often become distorted In one example participants viewed a simulated automobile accident at an intersection with a stop sign After the viewing half the participants received a suggestion that the traffic sign was a yield sign When asked later what traffic sign they remembered seeing at the intersection those who had been given the suggestion tended to claim that they had seen a yield sign Those who had not received the phony information were much more accurate in their recall of the traffic sign My students and I have now conducted more than 200 experiments involving over 20 000 individuals that document how exposure to misinformation induces memory distortion In these studies people recalled aconspicuous barn in a bucolic scene that contained no buildings at all broken glass and tape recorders that were not in the scenes they viewed a white instead of the blue vehicle in a crime scene and Minnie Mouse when they actually saw Mickey Mouse Taken together these studies show that misinformation can change an individual s recollection in predictable and sometimes very powerful ways Misinformation has the potential for invading our memories when we talk to other people when we are interrogated in a suggestive fashion or when we read or view media coverage about some event that we may have experienced ourselves After more than two decades exploring the power of misinformation researchers have learned a great deal about the conditions that make people susceptible to memory modification Memories are more easily modified for instance when the passage of time allows the original memory to fade False Childhood Memories It is one thing to change a detail or two in an otherwise intact memory but quite another to plant a false memory of an event that never happened To study false memory my students and I first had to find a way to plant a pseudomemory that would not cause our subjects undue emotional stress either in the process of creating the false memory or when we revealed that they had been intentionally deceived Yet we wanted to try to plant a memory that would be at least mildly traumatic had the experience actually happened My research associate Jacqueline E Pickrell and I settled on trying to plant a specific memory of being lost in a shopping mall or large department store at about the age of five Here s how we did it We asked our subjects 24 individuals ranging in age from 18 to 53 to try to remember childhood events that had been recounted by their parents older sibling or other close relative We prepared a booklet for each participant containing one paragraph stories about three events that actually happened to him or her
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