What do we know about false memories?

[random]

specifically how does a psychologist determine what is truth and what is false. Seems there has been a number of cases where the psychologist through the course of study actually creates the environment to produce them. My interest lies with a young child of 9 who is making accounts of his father which could be quite harmful. His Mother encourages anything negative about the father and does not challenge anything from the child but should the psychologist not do this? Would a psychologist not have a moral obligation to find the truth? I am mostly interested in the process of determining fact from fiction in cases such as this.

[lemur]

Often people can't distinguish between received knowledge and knowledge derived from direct experience/observation. It is possible to develop an empirical awareness of the sources of one's knowledge, including memories, but I don't know if a child can do this, since many adults don't seem to be able to. Once the child is old enough to understand, they can be asked what the source of a particular memory is. They might remember that information was told to them by someone else and not directly experienced by them. Sometimes, however, the reverse is attempted and children/people are told that their actual experiences/memories are false for various reasons.

[Ringer]

Obviously any worries about harm coming to the child should be looked into further. But the easiest way to watch for lies, if there is nobody else to corroborate, is story consistency. There have been numerous studies that show when a memory is called it can easily be manipulated and changed. So some inconsistency is expected, but certain things should be steady. Ask questions like where were you, what was in the room at the time of event, etc. Now this line of questioning is only suitable for a familiar surrounding, so make sure the line of questions are answerable and check for consistency. On the same vein there are questions that would seem easy but are really easy to forget, commonly things like what was the person wearing.

 

Even though memories are malleable that doesn't mean that memories should be dismissed offhand, but should be looked at with careful scrutiny. The child should also be seen with and without the parents present, see if the story changes when the child is alone, with one parent or the other, and with both. The parents should also be talked to individually as well as together and with the child. Obviously this is not always possible, but if it is it's extremely useful.

[PhDwannabe]

how does a psychologist determine what is truth and what is false

Like anybody else does: very poorly. Many people in the public have a perception that psychologists are dark sorcerers who can bore into your skull and tell what you're thinking. (Many of the same people think psychologists are worthless and stupid. It's a cute juxtaposition of beliefs that reminds me of 9/11 truthers: 1) the government's hopelessly incompetent, 2) the government perpetuated the most massive conspiracy in history and nobody's talking.) This really is far from the case. Whenever people question me, "how can you tell if somebody's depressed/been abused/secretly taking drugs? And I almost invariably answer: "You ask him." Clinically, it's asking the right questions that we're trained for and good at.

 

Now, if you've done clinical work for a while, you get a halfway decent spidey sense. My clinical experience is training-based and thus minimal, but there are times when somebody says "it doesn't make me anxious at all" or "I'm not mad at her" that I know to raise an eyebrow, crack a little smile, and wait a moment for them to sigh and tell me the opposite. People with much more experience than me are yet better still. But that's a far, far way from lie detection.

 

If people are really motivated to lie, however, I don't predict I'd be much better than a smart layperson at detecting it. If I was any better, the effect would be small. It's just not within the purview of my training to be a lie detector.

 

Similarly, if people are convinced of something themselves, it's as good as if they were motivated to lie. Children (well, adults too) can often be experiencing a mix of both--really motivated to lie, and within a process of convincing themselves it's actually true.

 

Seems there has been a number of cases where the psychologist through the course of study actually creates the environment to produce them

I'm going to be moderately defensive of my profession and claim that most to many of these cases were perpetuated by individuals with lower levels of training, although no echelon of the field is without guilt. In short, you're right. The 1980s were fraught with particular scandal as mental health workers became convinced that abuse was both unprecedentedly rampant, detectable through relatively simple observation of a person's symptoms, and almost completely credulous when reported. In short: tons of people have been abused, if they've got migraines or are depressed, that's a sign of past childhood abuse, and if they tell you so, you've just got to believe them. (Again, the vast majority of psychologists were never convinced by this.) Of course, the problems here are obvious: if the therapist believes it, a client who's not quite sure of it is going to become damn convinced, damn quickly.

 

In the heroic narrative of my profession, this steaming turd of a professional practice continued in many quarters of the field until a psychologist named Beth Loftus came along and kicked it to hell. Her work on recovered memories systematically and beautifully destroyed these presumptions, convincingly showing that it's pretty easy to get people to believe ridiculous stuff that never happened to them, and completely constructed and uncorroborated memories of childhood are normative--almost all of us have several of them (sometimes quite cherished ones) that never happened. It was a big deal. Conferences were held, committees were formed, some people who got imprisoned on this testimony were released. If you've got journal access, you can get the Final Report of APA Working Group on Investigation of Memories of Childhood Abuse. It's in the Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, vol. 14. Gives quite a bit of good info about the relevant state of the science. Skepdic has a good article on it, too. Many of the issues apply to not only recovered memories, but more to the point of what you're asking about, events being currently reported. More to that point:

 

My interest lies with a young child of 9 who is making accounts of his father which could be quite harmful. His Mother encourages anything negative about the father and does not challenge anything from the child but should the psychologist not do this? Would a psychologist not have a moral obligation to find the truth? I am mostly interested in the process of determining fact from fiction in cases such as this.

Good question. Let me tell you a little bit about how it works. Child psychologists can be pretty good at dealing with kids who are making these sort of claims. Professionals are typically good at taking a position of healthy skepticism, along with compassion towards the client. But here's the fact: the psychologist in this case, believe it or not, is not obligated to find the truth. Rather, the psychologist is required to tell someone else, so they can do it.

 

As a mental health professional at any level, I operate under Mandatory Reporting laws found in every jurisdiction in the country. Generally, how it works is this: if a minor or a vulnerable adult reports to me anything reasonably suspicious of any kind of abuse or neglect (you say "accounts of his father which could be quite harmful," I'm going to make the assumption that's where we're going here), I've got to tell Child Protective Services, and damnit, I've got to tell them yesterday. (Yes, I have been involved in this in the past.) I am not the investigator--the state is the investigator. Although CPS is going to comprehensively interview me and is very interested in what I know already, it is often largely out of my hands from there. Statues do vary somewhat, but most of us understand that our duties as Mandatory Reporters extend to our entire lives once we work in a profession--it doesn't matter whether a client tells me this in a session, or some random stranger rings the doorbell and tells me right now. While it's difficult to define credulity by statue (i.e., exactly how sure of this do I have to be before I report, anyway?), most of us have a vivid picture in our heads of some judge or jury deciding that we ought to have been a good deal more credulous than we were, so we air greatly on the side of caution. Our failure to do so means possible civil penalties, criminal proceedings, and the very real potential of the end of our professional lives. It is taken, as you can imagine, extremely seriously.

 

Psychologists do understand--perhaps better than most people--the factors which might cause a person to say something that's not true. Whether the kid in question is reporting truth or not, it seems to me that he'd see some use out of some visits to a child psychologist. But keep in mind: your friendly neighborhood shrink will not hesitate in reporting to the proper authorities claims of abuse which are even moderately credulous. And when he does, he will not be the one investigating them. These investigators themselves are pretty good, and are not throwing people in jail based on a child's claims--they need evidence. Bruises, pictures, siblings who corroborate. If the father in question here knows the claims to be false, and knows that there's no evidence to suggest they'd be true, he'd have little to hide. The price of such a "hassle" may be worth it to him if it gets his kid into decent therapy.

 

Nobody can ethically make recommendations for people who aren't their patients. I can't and won't tell you what to do. But that's some information about how the system works.

Edited February 11, 2011 by PhDwannabe