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Reality Monitoring for Sexual Abuse Memories
Author(s) -
WARD GENEVIEVE,
CARROLL MARIE
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
applied cognitive psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.719
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1099-0720
pISSN - 0888-4080
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1099-0720(199708)11:4<293::aid-acp464>3.0.co;2-r
Subject(s) - psychology , autobiographical memory , sexual abuse , perception , cognitive psychology , developmental psychology , poison control , suicide prevention , recall , medical emergency , medicine , neuroscience
The reality monitoring model of Johnson and Raye proposes that the phenomenal characteristics of memories for real and imagined events are utilized in reality monitoring judgements. This study examined the reality monitoring strategies utilized by subjects when remembering sexual abuse, and compared them with the strategies utilized for other types of events. Thirty‐one subjects described how they knew that four different autobiographical events (a sexual abuse experience, another unrelated trauma experience, a social occasion, and an imagined event) had, or had not, happened. Sexual abuse experiences were found to elicit a unique reality monitoring response profile. This profile suggests that the characteristics of memory for sexual abuse may be more vivid than other memories. In addition, the profile for sexual abuse shows fewer contextual supporting memories than other real memories, and more psychological reasoning responses. The finding that emotional rehearsal can cause fading of perceptual detail was not found to hold for the long‐term autobiographical memories that were the object of this study. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.