Creating childhood memories

✍ Scribed by Elizabeth F. Loftus

• Book ID: 101278408
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 130 KB
• Volume: 11
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0888-4080
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-0720(199712)11:7<s75::aid-acp514>3.0.co;2-f

✦ Synopsis

After decades of deliberate attempts to change people's memories for the details of events that they had observed in the past, researchers turned their attention to the task of planting entirely false childhood memories. One way to accomplish this is to enlist the help of family members to suggest to subjects that their relatives saw the event being suggested. Using this method, researchers have succeeded in convincing adult subjects that as children they had a variety of complex experiences, such as being lost in a shopping mall for an extended time, being hospitalized overnight, or spilling punch at a family wedding. Individuals with higher dissociative capacity and higher hypnotizability have been shown to be more susceptible to these suggestions. Possible mechanisms by which false memories are created are described.