From Traumatic Memory to Traumatized Remembering: Beyond the Memory Wars, Part 1: Agreement

From the mid-1980s onwards, US courts have seen a dramatic increase in personal injury and criminal cases alleging harm caused by sexual abuse whose memories were ??recovered?? after decades of forgetting. These recovered memory claims were countered by the defense that they were false memories. Three types of personal injury cases have been the center of media attention: (1) adult daughters suing their fathers for alleged childhood incest; (2) families and patients suing psychotherapists for allegedly suggesting false incest memories; and (3) adults suing the Catholic Church alleging sexual abuse by priests. Legal outcomes have been inconsistent in part because scientific controversy has called the reliability of recovered memories into question. This article is the first in a three-part series that provides a forensic framework for understanding the current state of the recovered memory/false memory debate. It briefly describes the reasoning behind inconsistent legal decisions, identifying the minimum scientific issues that must achieve consensus to meet the needs of the legal system. It proposes epistemological criteria for determining whether a consensus has been achieved. It then identifies recovered memory issues about which there is now a consensus. The second article identifies recovered memory issues that lack consensus. The third article argues that the scientific controversy reflected confusion about different memory types. It proposes a phenomenological schema to integrate them and reduce legal confusion. It concludes that there is sufficient consensus about some recovered memory issues to meet minimal legal needs, while more research is needed for others.     

Memory Disorder

During all the changes of the last fifteen years Russia has not been able to rid itself of partiality in peering into its own past. Beginning in the second half of the 1980s, when Gorbachev's liberalization freed the task of remembering from the control of official historiography, several new images of the past have emerged, profoundly changing Russian citizens' views of their country only to retreat once more to the periphery of public awareness. The tragedy of Stalinism finally became an object of public discussion, then was ousted from public consciousness once more. Attitudes toward the October Revolution, which laid the foundations of the Soviet system, underwent radical revision, while an idealized picture of prerevolutionary Russia was instilled in the minds of Russian citizens. When Russia was first bidding farewell to the Soviet period, the alternative image of the past that was supposed to form the basis of a new identity took root easily, but over time it has lost much of its power. Another schism developed between the view of the past propagandized by the authorities and the public's living memory. At the dawn of the twenty-first century Russia still cannot cope with the agonizing experience it endured in the twentieth.     

From Oblivion to Memory: A Blueprint for the Amnesty

This Review Essay examines Mark Freeman??s thoughtful book, Necessary Evils: Amnesties and the Search for Justice. One of the book??s core arguments is that amnesties from criminal prosecution, however unpalatable to liberal legalist sensibilities, should not be entirely purged from the toolbox of post-conflict transitions. Although advancing this argument, Freeman also struggles with it, and ultimately builds a very restrained and heavily technocratic defense of the amnesty. This Review Essay weighs this argument, among others, on its own terms and also within the context of recent events that post-date the book??s publication. The result is a vibrant exposition of the limits of law, and the limits of politics, in transcending episodes of massive human rights violations.     

Associated Adults: Prospective Person Memory for Family Abducted Children

In family abductions, authorities sometimes release pictures of both missing children and associated adults. The effectiveness of this approach was tested in a prospective person memory experiment. Participants studied mock missing child posters including a picture of a child, a picture of a child alongside a picture of the correct adult, or a picture of a child alongside a picture of the incorrect adult. Participants then saw pictures of child/adult pairs with instructions to make a response to ‘alert authorities’ if the target individuals were seen. Including the picture of the correct adult on the poster, significantly improved recognition relative to the other two conditions. There was no significant effect of including the picture of the incorrect associated adult.     

Memory conformity and suggestibility

Abstract

The present study examined whether the degree to which participants engage in memory conformity, which occurs when a person alters their memory report of an event to be consistent with another person, can be predicted by their levels of interrogative suggestibility (IS), which is the degree to which people are susceptible to altering their memory reports during questioning. Memory conformity was introduced by having participant and confederate pairs study words and then complete a social recognition test where they took turns to make judgements to the same items. When the participants responded after the confederate, they tended to conform to confederate's judgements regardless of whether the confederate had made a correct or incorrect response. IS was measured using the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale 2. This scale allows separate measures of Yield, which is a measure of how susceptible people are to altering their memory reports of events as a result of leading questions, and Shift, which is a measure of how susceptible people are to changing responses to questions when placed under pressure to do so. Only Yield was a significant predictor of memory conformity.     

Eyewitness Memory in Context: Toward a Taxonomy of Eyewitness Error

Although eyewitness memory and identification have captured substantial research interest in the past decades, an understanding of the types and prevalence of errors typically made by eyewitnesses is lacking. The purpose of the present research was to begin the development of a taxonomy of eyewitness error, employing standardized stimuli and established techniques. Respondents were exposed to a crime scene modeled on SWAT-training scenarios for systematically varied exposure times, and were then asked to describe what they had seen. The stimuli and questions employed were prepared with the aid of senior police field training officers. As anticipated, eyewitness performance in general was subject to a variety of inaccuracies. Physical errors, such as mistakes in the clothing or physical characteristics of the perpetrator, or in details of the environmental context, predominated. However, other less-expected errors were also observed: in relatively low numbers of cases, witnesses inferred emotional states or intent on the part of the perpetrator or victim. Some contributed wholly artificial backstories, reported the future actions of the perpetrator or victim as memories, or even inserted themselves into the scene. The pattern of results was shown to interact with exposure time, gender of the perpetrator, and the presence or absence of weapons in the scene. The results of this study are consistent with reconfigurative theory dating to Bartlett (1932), with subsequent research, and with more recent work under the aegis of Gestalt/Feature-Intensive Processing theory. These findings provide information on types and prevalence of eyewitness error which should prove useful in investigative and courtroom settings.     

Interviewing Witnesses: The Effect of Forced Confabulation on Event Memory

After viewing a crime video, participants answered 16 answerable and 6 unanswerable questions. Those in the "voluntary guess" condition had a "don't know" response option; those in the "forced guess" condition did not. One week later the same questions were answered with a "don't know" option. In both experiments, information generated from forced confabulation was less likely remembered than information voluntarily self-generated. Further, when the same answer was given to an unanswerable question both times, the confidence expressed in the answer increased over time in both the forced and the voluntary guess conditions. Pressing eyewitnesses to answer questions, especially questions repeated thrice (Experiment 2), may not be an effective practice because it reliably increases intrusion errors but not correct recall.     

Technology and torts: Memory costs, nondurable precautions and interference effects

This article examines the influence of nondurable precaution technologies on the expansion of tort awards. We provide four contributions to the literature. First, we present a general, formal model on durable and non-durable precaution technology that focuses on memory costs. Second, because liability exposure creates interference, we argue that tort law perpetuates the expansion of awards. Third, because plaintiffs do not consider the social costs of interference effects, private litigation induces socially excessive suits. Fourth, while new harm-reducing technologies likely increase accident rates, such technologies also raise the ratio of trial costs to harm, leaving undetermined the overall effect of new technologies on the rate of litigation.     

心理学视域的集体记忆研究

集体记忆研究是社会学、历史学、文化人类学的一个重要课题.而近几年来,研究者不断强调人类记忆的社会性特征,重视吸收来自于社会学的记忆研究成果;深刻反思个体心理学对于记忆研究的弊端,积极促进记忆研究的文化转向;主张采纳后现代心理学思想的建构与叙事性观点,勇于借鉴后现代式的研究路径,这些做法促使集体记忆成为心理学界不可忽略的研究主题.目前,在心理学领域内,与集体记忆相关的诸多研究已经逐渐展开,但心理学研究集体记忆也存在着概念解释、方法选择以及具体操作等多方面的挑战.     

Memory in the Construction of Constitutions

In connection with the contemporary debates in political philosophy between liberal, republican and proceduralist–deliberative views of democratic politics, I deal with the question of how the different concepts in these debates can be related to the particular national history, memories and expectations of a polity. I shall concentrate on one German example of the relationship between constitutionalism and democracy, in order to show that political philosophy must pay more attention to the different shared practices and understandings within each liberal society.     

Repeated Eyewitness Identification Procedures: Memory,Decision Making,and Probative Value

Two experiments examined the effects of multiple identification procedures on identification responses, confidence, and similarity relationships. When the interval between first and second identification procedures was long (Experiment 1), correct and false identifications increased, but the probative value of a suspect identification changed little; consistent witnesses were more confident than inconsistent witnesses; and the similarity relationships between suspect and foils were unchanged. When the interval between first and second identification procedures was short (Experiment 2), suspect identification rates changed little, but foil identifications increased significantly; confidence for all identifications increased; consistent witnesses were more confident than inconsistent witnesses; and similarity relationships changed such that witnesses were less likely to identify the suspect as being the best match to the perpetrator.     

Digital Knowledge Exploitation: ICT, Memory Institutions and Innovation from Cultural Assets

There has been considerable recognition of the regional embeddedness of the knowledge-based economy and its uneven geographical incidence, with mainly urban or metropolitan areas being the crucibles of knowledge-intensive activities. Drawing from recent research conducted analysing cultural industries, the paper explores how the knowledge-based economy can be built upon, focussing on the value afforded by regional cultural diversity which offers a means of economic development and growth to peripheral regions.