Dissociation and false memory: the moderating role of trauma and cognitive ability

ABSTRACT

The term dissociation is often used to refer to a diverse range of psychological symptoms, including perceptual impairments, emotional detachment, and memory fragmentation. In the present study, we examined whether there was a relation between participants’ self-reports of dissociative experiences and their memory performance in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm—a laboratory-based procedure that is frequently used to investigate false memory. University students (N = 298) completed the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES) and the Traumatic Life Events Questionnaire (TLEQ). Participants were also administered a standardised intelligence test (Shipley-2), and they were tested in the DRM paradigm. Overall, experiencing trauma and dissociation, as well as lower levels of cognitive ability, were associated with higher false memory. These findings are discussed in the context of the activation monitoring theory of DRM false memory.

KEYWORDS:

• False memory
• dissociation
• cognitive ability
• trauma
• DRM paradigm

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The importance of using the DES is that it was developed based on the continuum model of dissociation which is particularly important when working with non-clinical samples. Most of the studies conducted to date have used either the original form of the DES (Bernstein & Putnam, 1986) or the DES-C (Wright & Loftus, 1999) in non-clinical samples (e.g., *Dehon et al., 2008; *Nichols & Loftus, 2019; *Platt et al., 1998; *Winograd et al., 1998; *Wright et al., 2005). In addition, it has been shown that the DES-II and DES-C have equivalent psychometrics among undergraduate students (Patihis & Lynn, 2017).

2 - In line with conventional standards, we present correlation coefficients (r) along with 95% Confidence Intervals (CI); r’s ≥ .50 were considered as large effect sizes, r’s between .30 and .50 as moderate effect sizes, and r’s < .30 as small effect sizes.

3 The present data were part of a larger PhD project investigating personality-related psychopathology and false memory, but the research questions and the primary analysis described here are unique.

4 The DES-Taxon subscale represents the extreme deviation from normative episodes of dissociation (Ogawa et al., 1997; Dell & O'Neil, 2010).

5 To control trauma floor effects (due to our non-clinical sample), we excluded all of the participants who reported zero trauma, but this did not strengthen the correlation between these variables, implying that our findings were not affected by a floor effect.

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by a Marsden grant (18-UOO-014) from the Royal Society of New Zealand.