Autobiographical memory specificity in adults reporting repressed, recovered, or continuous memories of childhood sexual abuse

Abstract

Some psychotherapists believe that adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) are characterised by memory deficits for their childhood. Using the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT), we asked nonabused control participants and participants who reported either continuous, recovered, or repressed memories of CSA to retrieve a specific personal memory in response to either positive or negative cue words from either childhood or adolescence/adulthood. The results indicated that participants who believed they harboured repressed memories of abuse tended to exhibit the greatest difficulty retrieving specific memories from their childhood. Neither posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) nor major depression was related to diminished memory specificity.

Notes

Preparation of this article was supported by National Institute of Mental Health grant (MH61268) awarded to the first author.

As these analyses show, the groups differed on several variables (e.g., anxiety). However, because participants were not randomly assigned to groups, we cannot “control for” anxiety, and so forth when testing for differences among the groups in memory performance. As Miller and Chapman (2001) emphasised in their article on the inappropriate use of analysis of covariance in psychopathology research, one cannot achieve “the superficially appealing goal of ‘correcting’ or ‘controlling for’ real group differences on a potential covariate” (p. 40). At any event, correlational analyses indicated that questionnaire measures on which some of the groups differed were not significantly related (ps > .05) to the key dependent variable: Specificity of childhood memories. The main findings were: specificity of childhood memories correlated with the measures of depression (r = −.10), dissociation (r = .02), absorption (r = .13), and anxiety (r = −.07), and percentage of first memories retrieved from childhood that were specific correlated with the measures of depression (r = −.16), dissociation (r = .00), absorption (r = .10), and anxiety (r = −.08). Even if a variable (e.g., anxiety) differs across groups, its negligible correlation with the dependent variable (e.g., memory specificity) means that it does not pose interpretive problems as a confound. However, one measure of cognitive ability was significantly related to specificity of memory retrieval from childhood: the greater a participant's nonverbal (but not verbal) ability, the greater the proportion of childhood memories retrieved that were specific (r = .33, p < .01). Neither verbal nor nonverbal cognitive ability was significantly related to the percentage of first childhood memories retrieved that were specific.