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Participants with varying amounts of psychology training were asked to indicate their degrees of belief in a series of recovered memory scenarios. Across all expertise levels, participants expressed greater belief in recovered memories of being lost in a shopping mall than in memories of sexual abuse or satanic ritual participation. Spontaneously recovered memories were most believable to participants with greater psychology training, whereas psychology novices expressed greater degrees of belief in memories recovered under hypnotherapy. Participants with greater psychology training expressed greater skepticism about repressed memories, across scenario types.
The debate over the existence and accuracy of repressed/recovered memories has become one of the most contentious controversies in recent psychological history. If one believes the extremists on either side of the debate, then our country is either in the midst of an epidemic of repressed memories of physical and sexual abuse-or an epidemic of false memories implanted by unscrupulous therapists. Court cases have been won and lost on the testimony of psychological experts (see, for examples, Ofshe & Watters, 1994) who argue the reality of "recovered" or "delayed" memory before juries who may know little about the psychological theory and research that is relevant.
Within the research community, the past few years have seen a number of calls for a more reasoned approach. Pope (1996), for example, persuasively argued that the creation of false memories in the laboratory does not imply the truth (or falsehood) of any particular claim of repression and recovered memory in the real world. But if we cannot label all such claims as either "real repressed memories" or "false memories," how do we judge the believability of stories of repression and recovery?
From a decision-making standpoint, belief in any claim represents a judgment supported (or refuted) by varying types of evidence. Consider, for example, television actress Roseanne Barr's well publicized claim of recovered memory of childhood abuse (Bane, 1991). Among other incidents, Roseanne claims to have recovered the memory of being in her crib, around the age of two, and having her mother push a pillow into her face. The knowledgeable reader who judges the believability of such a story might consider a number of factors: How long was the memory inaccessible before it resurfaced? Under what conditions was the...