Word: loftus
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...repressed memories pop up years later, brain specialists say, they must be imperfect-and highly vulnerable to outside influence and revision. Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, has shown just how easy it is to create a false memory. In a study to be published this summer, Loftus asked older siblings or other relatives of 24 people to make up a story about the younger person being lost at the mall between the ages of four and six. While 18 participants insisted that the incident had never happened, six of them not only believed...
Without corroborating evidence, Loftus says, an accurate memory cannot be distinguished from an imagined one. But therapists often feel that it is not their job to judge their patients' credibility. That's a mistake, says Dr. Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Medical School. "By not making an attempt to find additional confirmation for what the patient is telling you, you are ultimately saying that you believe the patient simply because the patient's feelings are so intense," he says. And yet, he adds, "feelings can mislead...
Doubting abuse victims' claims is legitimate. Memories of abuse often surface in therapy, and in therapy subjects are often open to suggestion. Elizabeth Loftus, a memory researcher at the University of Washington, has been able, in experimental situations, to trick people into believing that they underwent unpleasant incidents as children. She implants these false memories by having an older sibling whom the subject trusts recount the episode...
...Repression definitions are so loose and varied, so abundant, so shifting that it is like trying to shoot a moving target," says Elizabeth Loftus, professor of psychology and law at the University of Washington and an authority on cognitive processes, long-term memory and eyewitness testimony. "If repression is the avoidance in your conscious awareness of unpleasant experiences that come back to you, yes, I believe in repression. But if it is a blocking out of an endless stream of traumas that occur over and over that leave a person with absolutely no awareness that these things happen, that make...
...Loftus, co-author of Witness for the Defense (St. Martin's Press; $19.95) and an expert witness on memory in the cases involving the McMartin Preschool, Oliver North and the Hillside Strangler, speculates that such prestige- enhancing revisionism by Thomas could be one explanation for why his memory differs so radically from Hill's. Thomas is a "rigid person who insisted on the prerogatives of his position," observes Emory's Neisser; such people can be "good repressers" of unpleasant memories. As for Hill, Loftus suggests that it is possible she unconsciously confused some past experiences. "Could she have gotten...