Maia
Graduate Poster
- Joined
- Jul 20, 2009
- Messages
- 1,259
I know all about Elizabeth Loftus, including much that "Roma Hart" did not see fit to mention, but if I post it here, then I am descending to "Roma's" level, and I have decided not to do it. I am extremely familiar with all the information and I most certainly had the time to research all of it. I am the one who has posted dozens and dozens and dozens of APA formatted references. (Also, let's give the entire URL... Link.I finally decided that it was irresponsible to make ad hominem arguments, but if others want to do it, they are free to do so. I do not expect to see "Roma" deal with anything I repeatedly argued about the fatal flaws in Loftus's work or any of the information I presented, which is the only thing that matters here. Calling names does not change whether or not research is done well. Personal attacks do not make bad research into good research. Ad hominem silliness does not change bad methodology into good methodology. I have extensively analyzed Loftus's work, which I decided on balance was much more important than posting endless ad hominem information about her. But I meant what I said when I said that discussing what I know about"Roma's" case is something I do not feel is ethical, and I still will not do it or present any information about it. There are real people behind the keyboards, and I don't forget that.
Okay! The most important argument first about that article.
Remember that just because doing a word search for “repression” doesn’t find it on the page, the question about whether or not there was really any discussion or evidence related to what happened with memory, repression, memory retrieval, and memory reliability hasn’t been answered. The question was the “nature and reliability of traumatic memories.” Can memories formed under trauma be trusted? As defined by the researchers, the exact problem is the same one I’ve been talking about: “It is questionable whether findings of memory distortions in normal subjects exposed to videotaped stresses in the laboratory can serve as a meaningful guides to understanding traumatic memories. Clearly, there is little similarity between viewing a simulated car accident on a TV screen, and being the responsible driver in a car crash in which one's own children are killed.” Memories that are not significant or personally important to a person are not necessarily always reliable, and the researchers talk about this in other parts of the paper as well. (Although they don’t discuss it here, again, there’s no question that a very small and extremely suggestible percentage of the population collides with nutcase therapists and makes it possible for traumatic memories to be implanted in a few cases. The question is whether this can happen in more than extremely rare cases. Confabulation, which occurs as a result of physical injury to the brain, also occurs—but that’s a completely different phenomenon from we’ve been talking about all along. See? I play devil’s advocate against my own arguments. If they don’t stand up to that, then they’re not worth making. )
The real issue is what was actually found in this study, and this is the reason why it was included in this list, because it does indeed support the entire argument about repressed memory—but it’s vital to understand what repressed memory is. I’ll quote this in its entirety, because I think it’s important enough to do it—my comments in parantheses: “No subject reported having a narrative for the traumatic event as their initial mode of awareness (they claimed not having been able to tell a story about what had happened), regardless of whether they had continuous awareness of what had happened , or whether there had been a period of amnesia. (So those memories weren’t available. Somehow, in some way, they HAD to be repressed.) There were no statistically significant differences between the subjects with childhood (CT) vs adult trauma (AT) in terms of the sensory modalities first experienced, although there was a trend towards more visual intrusions in the adult trauma group. Figure 1 indicates that all subjects, regardless of age at which the first trauma occurred, reported that they initially "remembered" the trauma in the form of somatosensory or emotional flashback experiences. At the peak of their intrusive recollections all sensory modalities were enhanced, and a narrative memory started to emerge. Currently, most subjects continued to experience their trauma in sensorimotor modes, but while 41 (89)% were able to narrate a satisfactory story about what happened to them, (11%-all CT) (11% of the sample who had experienced childhood trauma) continued to be unable to tell a coherent narrative, with a beginning, middle and end, even though all of them had outside confirmation of the reality of their trauma, i.e. a mother who knew, a perpetrator who confessed, hospital or court records.
What this passage is saying is that 11% of this sample, even as adults, couldn’t accurately recall a coherent traumatic memory—and yet it was independently confirmed. The other 89% did accurately recall the memory, but this memory didn’t come back all at once for anyone, not even for one person. Now imagine that someone in the 89% said, “I remember this traumatic thing which happened to me as a child, but it I didn’t remember it at first. I had amnesia about it.” In the context of this article, this person would clearly be identified as having repressed this memory, and it probably would be suspect. Yet 11% of this sample never did recall anything coherently, and yet had their traumatic memories corroborated. It shows that it is *possible* for a memory to be unavailable for recall for a long period of time for whatever reason (“repressed” in some way, for some reason), to later retrieve it, and to have this memory still be correct, without any intervention from therapists or anyone else. This is what I believe this study can tend to indicate rather than a general statement about the level of amnesia or general characteristics of trauma survivors.
Everybody has to make up their own minds about the implications of this, but I just don’t think it makes sense to do it without looking at ALL the studies, research, and evidence, not just a few sensational stories. Even one randomly chosen study turned out to provide support for the argument! I don’t think some people are going to like this. That’s fine. We’re all going to have our own opinions and feelings. Everybody has the right to differing opinions and feelings. But facts are facts. Studies say what they say. If a particular study has such serious methodological problems that they can’t be overlooked at all, if the researcher told falsehoods about it consistently, claiming higher success rates than actually existed and claiming it was “easy” to convince people they’d been lost in a mall when it wasn’t, claiming that convincing people of an unimportant memory proved that people could be convinced of childhood sexual abuse—which other memory researchers don’t do, unless they’re connected with her—then these are facts, too. It’s common sense. I’m one of those people who always want everybody to like what I say (unfortunate, really), but at some point, that can’t be more important to me than the basic facts.
There’s been so much mixing together when it comes to the study of memory that it’s very difficult to sort things out, but again, the entire idea of “recovered memory” or “repressed memory” becomes a mixture between a red herring and a straw man. In short, it’s turned into such a dirty word (“dirty phrase”?), and yet we never really even know or define what we’re talking about most of the time. The more general memory studies didn’t have anything to do with therapists, or therapists recovering memories or suggesting anything, the Loftus study actually never did either (!), and neither did this one. That’s what being referred to—sort of, I think—and yet it hasn’t been defined, and the studies and research don’t exist, and a few sensational stories are not the same. It’s not even apples being compared to oranges—it’s more like imaginary dragons being compared to oranges. It’s so vague that unless it’s really ever defined by anyone in quantifiable terms, I honestly don’t think I can speak any more to it, or answer questions that haven’t been clearly asked to begin with. The question of traumatic memories in general, though, is a lot more interesting.
This article makes it clear in the first section that what we’re really talking about is Janet’s idea of repression/dissociation rather than Freudian repression, which is why I think that Freud’s earlier ideas were more interesting; they’re interesting in light of Janet’s. That’s what I would want to re-examine and retrieve. Freud’s ideas won out and then turned into a silly navel-gazing focus on internal processes. I think we’d all be a lot better off today if Janet had won the argument around the turn of the century, which he didn’t. Freud became the subject of discussion on this thread because he’s the one that, frankly, I think everyone is familiar with, but he’s far from the most interesting early theorist, and when it comes to dissociative disorders, Janet is much more germane.
Footnotes
Is the question about participants being recruited by newspaper unreasonable compared to similar studies, however? Are we setting up a straw man by expecting it to measure up to expectations higher than what is expected of other studies?
Also, exactly what is an in-depth interview? Can the same be said about this? Let's see exactly what the study outlined on this subject:
Subjects were asked to sign an informed consent and filled out self-rated questionnaires, after which they participated in the interview. The instruments used were:
1. Traumatic Antecedents Questionnaire (self-rating version) (TAQ), a 78 item questionnaire to identify exposure to taumatic life events (self-rated version of the TAQ, Herman, Perry & van der Kolk, 1989, van der Kolk, Perry & Herman, 1991).
2. The Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES- Bernstein & Putnam, 1986).
3. The interviewer and subject then together made an Inventory of Traumatic Experiences which systematically asked them about the circumstances and specifics of their trauma(s). After finishing these interviews, subjects were asked to indicate which par ticular traumatic experience that had had most effect on their lives, and to identify an intense, but non-traumatic experience, that was used as the "control" experience.
4. Subjects were then given the Traumatic Memory Inventory, a 60 item structured interview that systematically collects data about the circumstances and means of memory retrieval of a traumatic memory, comparing those with the subjects' memories of a personally highly emotionally significant, but non-traumatic event. The TMI describes 1) nature of trauma(s), 2) duration, 3) whether subject has always been aware that trauma happened, and if not, when and where subject became conscious of trauma, 4) ci rcumstances under which subject first experienced intrusive memories; and circumstances under which they occur presently, 5) sensory modalities in which memories were experienced a) as a story b) as an image (what did you see ?) c) in sounds (what did you hear ?), d) as a smell (what did you smell ?), e) as feelings in your body (what did you feel ? where?), f) as emotions (what did you feel, what was it like ?),. These data were collected for how subjects remembered the trauma a) initially, b) whilesubj ect was most bothered by them, and c) currently. The interview also asked about 6) nature of flashbacks, 7) nature of nightmares, 8) precipitants of flashbacks and nightmares, 9) ways of mastering intrusive recollections(e.g. by eating, working, taking drugs or alcohol, cleaning, etc. 10) Confirmation: records: court or hospital, direct witness, relative went through same trauma, other.
All information was collected first for traumatic events, then for a non-traumatic event, like a wedding, vacation, graduation, the birth of a child, or an accomplishment in school or at work.
The interviews took about 2 hours and were conducted by staff of the Trauma Center. Information gathered from the TMI was presented to the members of the Trauma Center memory research group who came to a consensus about the scoring of each item of the interviews. We were unable to establish a meaningful way for the raters to be blind to whether they were scoring the answers to traumatic or non-traumatic memories.
In-depth interview: a face-to-face conversation to explore issues; conducted without using a structured questionnaire
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1871685
The problem is that if that’s ALL that was done, this wouldn’t have been a quantitative study, but a qualitative one. I would argue that what was done here did include significant elements of an in-depth interview while also retaining the necessary quantitative elements. In the NIH definition- “in-depth interview” is not defined by length; here, it was two hours. Would it have been more technically correct to use another term? Yes, I think it would have, because “in-depth interview” is literally a qualitative term, but I think it was also clearly meant in a non-technical way; readers would follow up and find out that as a basically quantitative study, this didn’t include strictly defined in-depth interviews. Here’s a good page about conducting an indepth interview. http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/FY393
The co-morbidity issue is one that I wish all researchers would address, but unfortunately, this is usually not done. With CBT studies, for example, my biggest issue is that people with co-occurring disorders are screened out of studies. The success rates look great, but this makes it very difficult to know how CBT can really work in clinical practice. In clinical FDA approval trials for new medications, people with co-occuring conditions are screened out. Again, this is necessary, but unfortunate. I do have references for this, so if anyone wants to see them, please ask.
Differential scales would have been helpful, and they did talk about types of trauma, but because this was more about the nature of memory and the reliability of recall, I don’t think that this was a real problem. Nor the history of intervention. Also, I would argue that this issue would reach more significance if, and only if, my arguments relied entirely, largely, significantly, or even, say, 10 or 20 or 30% on this article, or if it were the only one making a particular claim.
This was so much work, and what it finally showed is that this article supported everything I said, and claiming otherwise showed that it hadn't been read. I really just don't see the point of continuing to go around and around about this. People are asking questions that have been answered and that show they haven't read what I've written, ignoring the points I'm making, making ad hominem statements, bringing up irrelevant information, and so on and on and on. I've answered and answered and answered the OP questions and also everything that came up about repressed memory, even though that was really a cross between a straw man and a red herring, quite honestly.
I hope that the people who read this thread have at least gotten some food for thought. We're supposed to be skeptics here-- so be skeptical. Don't exchange one kind of dogma for another, one way of being gullible for another, one set of unexamined ideas for another. Go out there and look at all the information. Don't uncritically believe me, Roma Hart, Loftus, any expert, any random person, or anybody else. Go and see for yourself. Go and read for yourself. Stop and think about what quality evidence means. Don't allow yourself to be led by emotional reasoning, anecdotes, ad hominem arguments, and false logic. We're all smarter than that, and we can all do better.
Okay! The most important argument first about that article.
Remember that just because doing a word search for “repression” doesn’t find it on the page, the question about whether or not there was really any discussion or evidence related to what happened with memory, repression, memory retrieval, and memory reliability hasn’t been answered. The question was the “nature and reliability of traumatic memories.” Can memories formed under trauma be trusted? As defined by the researchers, the exact problem is the same one I’ve been talking about: “It is questionable whether findings of memory distortions in normal subjects exposed to videotaped stresses in the laboratory can serve as a meaningful guides to understanding traumatic memories. Clearly, there is little similarity between viewing a simulated car accident on a TV screen, and being the responsible driver in a car crash in which one's own children are killed.” Memories that are not significant or personally important to a person are not necessarily always reliable, and the researchers talk about this in other parts of the paper as well. (Although they don’t discuss it here, again, there’s no question that a very small and extremely suggestible percentage of the population collides with nutcase therapists and makes it possible for traumatic memories to be implanted in a few cases. The question is whether this can happen in more than extremely rare cases. Confabulation, which occurs as a result of physical injury to the brain, also occurs—but that’s a completely different phenomenon from we’ve been talking about all along. See? I play devil’s advocate against my own arguments. If they don’t stand up to that, then they’re not worth making. )
The real issue is what was actually found in this study, and this is the reason why it was included in this list, because it does indeed support the entire argument about repressed memory—but it’s vital to understand what repressed memory is. I’ll quote this in its entirety, because I think it’s important enough to do it—my comments in parantheses: “No subject reported having a narrative for the traumatic event as their initial mode of awareness (they claimed not having been able to tell a story about what had happened), regardless of whether they had continuous awareness of what had happened , or whether there had been a period of amnesia. (So those memories weren’t available. Somehow, in some way, they HAD to be repressed.) There were no statistically significant differences between the subjects with childhood (CT) vs adult trauma (AT) in terms of the sensory modalities first experienced, although there was a trend towards more visual intrusions in the adult trauma group. Figure 1 indicates that all subjects, regardless of age at which the first trauma occurred, reported that they initially "remembered" the trauma in the form of somatosensory or emotional flashback experiences. At the peak of their intrusive recollections all sensory modalities were enhanced, and a narrative memory started to emerge. Currently, most subjects continued to experience their trauma in sensorimotor modes, but while 41 (89)% were able to narrate a satisfactory story about what happened to them, (11%-all CT) (11% of the sample who had experienced childhood trauma) continued to be unable to tell a coherent narrative, with a beginning, middle and end, even though all of them had outside confirmation of the reality of their trauma, i.e. a mother who knew, a perpetrator who confessed, hospital or court records.
What this passage is saying is that 11% of this sample, even as adults, couldn’t accurately recall a coherent traumatic memory—and yet it was independently confirmed. The other 89% did accurately recall the memory, but this memory didn’t come back all at once for anyone, not even for one person. Now imagine that someone in the 89% said, “I remember this traumatic thing which happened to me as a child, but it I didn’t remember it at first. I had amnesia about it.” In the context of this article, this person would clearly be identified as having repressed this memory, and it probably would be suspect. Yet 11% of this sample never did recall anything coherently, and yet had their traumatic memories corroborated. It shows that it is *possible* for a memory to be unavailable for recall for a long period of time for whatever reason (“repressed” in some way, for some reason), to later retrieve it, and to have this memory still be correct, without any intervention from therapists or anyone else. This is what I believe this study can tend to indicate rather than a general statement about the level of amnesia or general characteristics of trauma survivors.
Everybody has to make up their own minds about the implications of this, but I just don’t think it makes sense to do it without looking at ALL the studies, research, and evidence, not just a few sensational stories. Even one randomly chosen study turned out to provide support for the argument! I don’t think some people are going to like this. That’s fine. We’re all going to have our own opinions and feelings. Everybody has the right to differing opinions and feelings. But facts are facts. Studies say what they say. If a particular study has such serious methodological problems that they can’t be overlooked at all, if the researcher told falsehoods about it consistently, claiming higher success rates than actually existed and claiming it was “easy” to convince people they’d been lost in a mall when it wasn’t, claiming that convincing people of an unimportant memory proved that people could be convinced of childhood sexual abuse—which other memory researchers don’t do, unless they’re connected with her—then these are facts, too. It’s common sense. I’m one of those people who always want everybody to like what I say (unfortunate, really), but at some point, that can’t be more important to me than the basic facts.
There’s been so much mixing together when it comes to the study of memory that it’s very difficult to sort things out, but again, the entire idea of “recovered memory” or “repressed memory” becomes a mixture between a red herring and a straw man. In short, it’s turned into such a dirty word (“dirty phrase”?), and yet we never really even know or define what we’re talking about most of the time. The more general memory studies didn’t have anything to do with therapists, or therapists recovering memories or suggesting anything, the Loftus study actually never did either (!), and neither did this one. That’s what being referred to—sort of, I think—and yet it hasn’t been defined, and the studies and research don’t exist, and a few sensational stories are not the same. It’s not even apples being compared to oranges—it’s more like imaginary dragons being compared to oranges. It’s so vague that unless it’s really ever defined by anyone in quantifiable terms, I honestly don’t think I can speak any more to it, or answer questions that haven’t been clearly asked to begin with. The question of traumatic memories in general, though, is a lot more interesting.
This article makes it clear in the first section that what we’re really talking about is Janet’s idea of repression/dissociation rather than Freudian repression, which is why I think that Freud’s earlier ideas were more interesting; they’re interesting in light of Janet’s. That’s what I would want to re-examine and retrieve. Freud’s ideas won out and then turned into a silly navel-gazing focus on internal processes. I think we’d all be a lot better off today if Janet had won the argument around the turn of the century, which he didn’t. Freud became the subject of discussion on this thread because he’s the one that, frankly, I think everyone is familiar with, but he’s far from the most interesting early theorist, and when it comes to dissociative disorders, Janet is much more germane.
Footnotes
Is the question about participants being recruited by newspaper unreasonable compared to similar studies, however? Are we setting up a straw man by expecting it to measure up to expectations higher than what is expected of other studies?
Also, exactly what is an in-depth interview? Can the same be said about this? Let's see exactly what the study outlined on this subject:
Subjects were asked to sign an informed consent and filled out self-rated questionnaires, after which they participated in the interview. The instruments used were:
1. Traumatic Antecedents Questionnaire (self-rating version) (TAQ
2. The Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES- Bernstein & Putnam, 1986).
3. The interviewer and subject then together made an Inventory of Traumatic Experiences which systematically asked them about the circumstances and specifics of their trauma(s). After finishing these interviews, subjects were asked to indicate which par ticular traumatic experience that had had most effect on their lives, and to identify an intense, but non-traumatic experience, that was used as the "control" experience.
4. Subjects were then given the Traumatic Memory Inventory, a 60 item structured interview that systematically collects data about the circumstances and means of memory retrieval of a traumatic memory, comparing those with the subjects' memories of a personally highly emotionally significant, but non-traumatic event. The TMI describes 1) nature of trauma(s), 2) duration, 3) whether subject has always been aware that trauma happened, and if not, when and where subject became conscious of trauma, 4) ci rcumstances under which subject first experienced intrusive memories; and circumstances under which they occur presently, 5) sensory modalities in which memories were experienced a) as a story b) as an image (what did you see ?) c) in sounds (what did you hear ?), d) as a smell (what did you smell ?), e) as feelings in your body (what did you feel ? where?), f) as emotions (what did you feel, what was it like ?),. These data were collected for how subjects remembered the trauma a) initially, b) whilesubj ect was most bothered by them, and c) currently. The interview also asked about 6) nature of flashbacks, 7) nature of nightmares, 8) precipitants of flashbacks and nightmares, 9) ways of mastering intrusive recollections(e.g. by eating, working, taking drugs or alcohol, cleaning, etc. 10) Confirmation: records: court or hospital, direct witness, relative went through same trauma, other.
All information was collected first for traumatic events, then for a non-traumatic event, like a wedding, vacation, graduation, the birth of a child, or an accomplishment in school or at work.
The interviews took about 2 hours and were conducted by staff of the Trauma Center. Information gathered from the TMI was presented to the members of the Trauma Center memory research group who came to a consensus about the scoring of each item of the interviews. We were unable to establish a meaningful way for the raters to be blind to whether they were scoring the answers to traumatic or non-traumatic memories.
In-depth interview: a face-to-face conversation to explore issues; conducted without using a structured questionnaire
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1871685
The problem is that if that’s ALL that was done, this wouldn’t have been a quantitative study, but a qualitative one. I would argue that what was done here did include significant elements of an in-depth interview while also retaining the necessary quantitative elements. In the NIH definition- “in-depth interview” is not defined by length; here, it was two hours. Would it have been more technically correct to use another term? Yes, I think it would have, because “in-depth interview” is literally a qualitative term, but I think it was also clearly meant in a non-technical way; readers would follow up and find out that as a basically quantitative study, this didn’t include strictly defined in-depth interviews. Here’s a good page about conducting an indepth interview. http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/FY393
The co-morbidity issue is one that I wish all researchers would address, but unfortunately, this is usually not done. With CBT studies, for example, my biggest issue is that people with co-occurring disorders are screened out of studies. The success rates look great, but this makes it very difficult to know how CBT can really work in clinical practice. In clinical FDA approval trials for new medications, people with co-occuring conditions are screened out. Again, this is necessary, but unfortunate. I do have references for this, so if anyone wants to see them, please ask.
Differential scales would have been helpful, and they did talk about types of trauma, but because this was more about the nature of memory and the reliability of recall, I don’t think that this was a real problem. Nor the history of intervention. Also, I would argue that this issue would reach more significance if, and only if, my arguments relied entirely, largely, significantly, or even, say, 10 or 20 or 30% on this article, or if it were the only one making a particular claim.
This was so much work, and what it finally showed is that this article supported everything I said, and claiming otherwise showed that it hadn't been read. I really just don't see the point of continuing to go around and around about this. People are asking questions that have been answered and that show they haven't read what I've written, ignoring the points I'm making, making ad hominem statements, bringing up irrelevant information, and so on and on and on. I've answered and answered and answered the OP questions and also everything that came up about repressed memory, even though that was really a cross between a straw man and a red herring, quite honestly.
I hope that the people who read this thread have at least gotten some food for thought. We're supposed to be skeptics here-- so be skeptical. Don't exchange one kind of dogma for another, one way of being gullible for another, one set of unexamined ideas for another. Go out there and look at all the information. Don't uncritically believe me, Roma Hart, Loftus, any expert, any random person, or anybody else. Go and see for yourself. Go and read for yourself. Stop and think about what quality evidence means. Don't allow yourself to be led by emotional reasoning, anecdotes, ad hominem arguments, and false logic. We're all smarter than that, and we can all do better.
Last edited:
He told me about this thread.
so my intention has to be gleaned from my history here.
