32 VOLUME 12 NUMBER 1 FEBRUARY 2003 Recovering Memories of Trauma A View From the Laboratory Richard J McNally1 Department of Psychology Harvard University Cambridge Massachusetts Abstract The controversy over the validity of repressed and recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse CSA has been extraordinarily bitter Yet data on cognitive functioning in people reporting repressed and recovered memories of trauma have been strikingly scarce Recent laboratory studies have been designed to test hypotheses about cognitive mechanisms that ought to be operative if people can repress and recover memories of trauma or if they can form false memories of trauma Contrary to clinical lore these studies have shown that people reporting CSA histories are not characterized by a superior ability to forget trauma related material Other studies have shown that individuals reporting recovered memories of either CSA or abduction by space aliens are characterized by heightened proneness to form false memories in certain laboratory tasks Although cognitive psychology methods cannot distinguish true memories from false ones these methods can illuminate mechanisms for remembering and forgetting among people reporting histories of trauma Keywords recovered memories trauma repression sexual abuse dissociation How victims remember trauma is among the most explosive issues facing psychology today Most experts agree that combat rape and other horrific experiences are unforgettably engraved on the mind Pope Oliva Hudson 1999 But some also believe that the mind can defend itself by banishing traumatic memories from awareness making it difficult for victims to remember them until many years later Brown Scheflin Hammond 1998 This controversy has spilled out of the clinics and cognitive psychology laboratories fracturing families triggering legislative change and determining outcomes in civil suits and criminal trials Most contentious has been the claim that victims of childhood sexual abuse CSA often repress and then recover memories of their trauma in adulthood 2 Some psychologists believe that at least some of these memories may be false inadvertently created by risky therapeutic methods e g hypnosis guided imagery Ceci Loftus 1994 One striking aspect of this controversy has been the paucity of data on cognitive functioning in people reporting repressed and recovered memories of CSA Accordingly my colleagues and I have been conducting studies designed to test hypotheses about mechanisms that might enable people either to repress and recover memories of trauma or to develop false memories of trauma For several of our studies we recruited four groups of women from the community Subjects in the repressed memory group suspected they had been sexually abused as children but they had Published by Blackwell Publishing Inc no explicit memories of abuse Rather they inferred their hidden abuse history from diverse indicators such as depressed mood interpersonal problems with men dreams and brief recurrent visual images e g of a penis which they interpreted as flashbacks of early trauma Subjects in the recoveredmemory group reported having remembered their abuse after long periods of not having thought about it 3 Unable to corroborate their reports we cannot say whether the memories were true or false Lack of corroboration of course does not mean that a memory is false Subjects in the continuous memory group said that they had never forgotten their abuse and subjects in the control group reported never having been sexually abused PERSONALITY TRAITS AND PSYCHIATRIC SYMPTOMS To characterize our subjects in terms of personality traits and psychiatric symptoms we asked them to complete a battery of questionnaires measuring normal personality variation e g differences in absorption which includes the tendency to fantasize and to become emotionally engaged in movies and literature depressive symptoms posttraumatic stress disorder PTSD symptoms and dissociative symptoms alterations in consciousness such as memory lapses feeling disconnected with one s body or episodes of spacing out McNally Clancy Schacter Pitman 2000b There were striking similarities and differences among the groups in terms of personality profiles and psychiatric symptoms Subjects who had always remembered their abuse were indistinguishable from those who said they had never been abused on all personality measures Moreover the continuous memory and control groups CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE did not differ in their symptoms of depression posttraumatic stress or dissociation However on the measure of negative affectivity proneness to experience sadness anxiety anger and guilt the repressed memory group scored higher than did either the continuous memory or the control group whereas the recovered memory group scored midway between the repressed memory group on the one hand and the continuous memory and control groups on the other The repressed memory subjects reported more depressive dissociative and PTSD symptoms than did continuous memory and control subjects Repressed memory subjects also reported more depressive and PTSD symptoms than did recovered memory subjects who in turn reported more dissociative and PTSD symptoms than did control subjects Finally the repressedand recovered memory groups scored higher than the control group on the measure of fantasy proneness and the repressedmemory group scored higher than the continuous memory group on this measure This psychometric study shows that people who believe they harbor repressed memories of sexual abuse are more psychologically distressed than those who say they have never forgotten their abuse FORGETTING TRAUMARELATED MATERIAL Some clinical theorists believe that sexually molested children learn to disengage their attention during episodes of abuse and allocate it elsewhere e g Terr 1991 If CSA survivors possess a heightened ability to disengage attention from threatening cues impairing their subsequent memory for them then this ability ought to be evident in the laboratory In our first exper iment we used directed forgetting methods to test this hypothesis McNally Metzger Lasko Clancy Pitman 1998 Our subjects were three groups of adult females CSA survivors with PTSD psychiatrically healthy CSA survivors and nonabused control subjects Each subject was shown on a computer screen a series of words that were either trauma related e g molested positive e g charming or neutral e g mailbox
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