Psychology Public Policy and Law 1998 Vol 4 No 4 1160 1181 Copyright 1998 by the American Psychological Association Inc 1076 8971 98 3 00 PSEUDOSCIENCE CROSS EXAMINATION AND SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE IN THE RECOVERED MEMORY CONTROVERSY Kenneth S Pope Norwalk CT The recovered memory controversy is a contentious mix of conflicting claims theories and research For example reports of recovered memories of child sex abuse may be described as the result of implanting false memory syndrome repression dissociation motivated forgetting directed forgetting amnesia betrayal trauma retroactive inhibition suggestion self induced hypnotic trance states personality disorder thought suppression retrieval inhibition cognitive gating or biological protective processes These terms may be used without clear definition or scientific basis and may unintentionally foster pseudoscientific beliefs Drawing on Daubert and other sources this article suggests using 6 basic sets of crossexamination questions to assess the material in this area and to expose pseudoscience These 6 questions focus on research basis unclear terms and deductive fallacies inferential errors and confirmation bias links in the chain of reasoning ad hominem fallacies and original sources The recovered memory controversy has emerged kicking and screaming during the past decade or so a daunting arena of science and pseudoscience of claims and conclusions in the absence of adequate data and data lacking adequate explanatory theories of elegant research bullying dogma thoughtful questions extreme positions and no shortage of confusion Attempts to understand how adults could come to report newly emerging memories about having experienced child sex abuse have become all but lost in a bewildering blizzard of conflicting terms and concepts Such reported memories may be described as the result of repression dissociation implanting motivated forgetting directed forgetting amnesia betrayal trauma retroactive inhibition suggestibility self induced hypnotic trance states personality disorder thought suppression retrieval inhibition cognitive gating processes biological protective processes a clinical syndrome and so on These terms and concepts may be used without clear definition or scientific basis and may foster pseudoscientific beliefs A useful approach to the booming buzzing confusion in this area may be to approach it as if it were an expert witness and to use the fundamental questions of cross examination to search out relevant information assess accuracy and expose pseudoscience The six sections that follow illustrate this process of crossexamination emphasizing the importance of closely examining a research basis b unclear terms and deductive fallacies c inferential errors and confirmation bias d links in the chain of reasoning e ad hominem fallacies and f original Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kenneth S Pope P O Box 777 Norwalk Connecticut 06856 0777 Electronic mail may be sent via the World Wide Web site at http www idealist com memuries 1160 PSEUDOSCIENCE AND CROSS EXAMINATION 1161 The Research Basis One of the landmark shifts in the cross examination of expert witnesses occurred with the U S Supreme Court s 1993 rendering of the Daubert v Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals decision Prior to Daubert the admissibility of scientific testimony was most often determined by some version of the 1923 Frye rule Frye focused on whether a concept finding theory or claim had been generally accepted by the scientific community Daubert interpreting the 1974 Federal Rules of Evidence broadened the focus to include questions such as whether the matter had been subjected to methodologically sound research and scientifically sound inference and whether it had appeared in peer review journals When considering the area of recovered and false memories it is crucial to determine the degree to which scientific research supports any specific claim For example consider the following two statements Blume 1990 wrote that it is not unlikely that more than half of all women are survivors of childhood sexual trauma p iv italics in original Martinson 1994 wrote that In the process of growing up it is almost inevitable that a child will have one or more encounters of a sexual nature in which the other party is either too young or too old to be regarded as a peer p 75 What if any scientific research supports such claims It appears that there are no scientific studies published in the peer reviewed scientific literature that establish the validity of these statements It is not just conclusions such as those above but also evaluative instruments that may lack a basis in research providing scientific evidence of their validity or reliability Unfortunately there seems to be no shortage of unvalidated checklists used by those at either extreme in this controversy for a discussion of unvalidated checklists in this area see Olio 1996 Pope Brown 1996 Although many concepts claims and instruments in this area clearly lack any research basis in other instances determining whether there is a solid research basis is more challenging The concept repressed memories shows how complex and difficult making this determination can be Recovered memories of child sex abuse whether accurate or false are often termed repressed memories The use of this term often with ambiguity and confusion as to whether it simply means forgotten for a period of time or implies a specific mechanism of forgetting has grown common in the popular media legal cases and some of the scientific literature Interestingly those at both ends of this controversy s extremely polarized spectrum have used the term to describe the relevant mechanism for example Repressed Memories A Journey to Recovery From Sexual Abuse Fredrickson 1992 and The Myth of Repressed Memory False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse E F Loftus Ketcham 1994 Does the concept of repression rest on a sound research basis Early in the century a wide variety of laboratory experiments and other studies seemed at least according to the investigators to provide sound scientific support for the concept In Functional Abnormalities of Memory With Special Reference to Amnesia Sears 1936 focused on Freud s discussion of repression and how it could be tested experimentally Stewart 1962 reviewed 17 studies of repression and concluded that this research has refined methodology since the work of Sears and has related repression to other
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