Recovered Memories Case Study

Two groups of recovered memories
Research showed that there are two types of recovered memory experiences (Shobe & Schooler, 2001). In the recovered in therapy type, the memories of abuse are recovered gradually, mostly in a therapeutic context. For instance, consider a case study of Ten Broeke & Merckelbach (1996) in which a woman named Ellen went to a hypnotherapist for having sleeping- and anxiety problems. After three 2-hour sessions with this hypnotherapist, Ellen recollected a memory about her father. She remembered laying on her bed with her father bending over her. Ellen also mentioned being about four years old when this event happened. Furthermore, she told the therapist that her mother and father got divorced when Ellen was seven years old. Finally, the therapist and Ellen concluded that Ellen had been sexually abused by her father when she was younger. Suddenly, the cause of Ellen’s complaints could be explained. In contrast, in the spontaneously recovered memory type, people get a reminder (for example a salient retrieval cue) of a traumatic event, of which they believe that they had not thought about for several years. People with spontaneously recovered memories have always remembered their abuse experience, but they interpret it in a different manner

This paradigm provokes the production of pseudo memories. In this task, participants have to study a list of words, of which the words are related to each other, but also to a strongly related word that is not in the list (e.g. critical lure). For example, the words 'bed', 'rest', 'awake' and 'blanket' are presented in a list. Those words are strongly related to the non-presented word 'sleep'. Later on, participants have to do a memory test. In this test, they have to recall the words that were in the list they had studied at the beginning of the