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Repressed Memory Study

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Recovering memories after a traumatic experience is a controversial issue that researchers study for a long time and there are opposite opinions on that matter. Some psychologists believe that after having an appalling experience as children, the mind in order to protect us repress these memories and we can only recover them in older age. Others though oppose to this opinion that such experiences can never be forgotten. One question that arises is that if repressed memories can be recovered or are they after years false memories.
Having this in mind Richard J. McNally and his colleagues have contacted many studies, in order to examine which are the mechanisms that may be responsible for people to either repress and recover memories of trauma or create false memories of trauma. For their studies they used four groups of women.
The first was the “repressed memory” group. In this group, the subjects were women that they thought they had been sexual abused as children but had no memories of it, just some indications. The second group was the “recovered-memory” group. In this group, women said that even though there was a long period of time that they had not thought about their abuse they …show more content…
The results show similarities and differences between groups in personality traits and psychiatric symptoms. One of the results shows that all the personality measures were almost the same in the group of women that said that always remembered their abuse and those that stated that had never been abused. Another result shows that the repressed-memory group experienced sadness, anxiety, anger and guilt at higher levels and continuous and control memory groups at lower levels. The recovered-memory group scored in the midway. The result of the psychometric study shows that people that believe they have repressed memories are more distressed than those who always remembered their

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