Arnold, M. M., & Lindsay, S. D. (2002). Remembering remembering. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 28, 521-529.
Clancy, S. A., McNally, R. J., Schacter, D. L., Lenzenweger, M. F., & Pitman, R. K. (2002). Memory Distortion in people reporting abduction by aliens. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 111, 455-461.
These experimenters were
interested in false memories among people who reported false memories of being
abducted by aliens. They are going to
study false recall and false recognition within the three different groups the
participants was assigned. The first
experimental group consisted of those with recovered memories who claim to
remember their alien abduction experience and had just gotten over amnesia from
the traumatic event. The second group
consisted participants with repressed memories, they have no autobiographical
memories but display symptoms to which they believe are from the abductions but
have to actual memories of the event.
The third group serves as a control group, consisting of people who
never had any history of abductions. All
of the participants in each group filled out several questionnaires; they
consisted of the Mississippi Scale for Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress
Disorder, the Beck Depression Inventory, the Dissociative Experiences Scale,
the Absorption subscale of Tellegen’s Multidimensional Personality
Questionnaire, the Perceptual Aberration Scale, the Magical Ideation Scale, the
Referential Thinking scale, the Paranoid Schizophrenia scale. They were then presented a recall test from
a list of words and math problems. The
results of this experiment were that the subjects reporting recovered memories
were prone to false recognition.
Repressed and recovered memory groups were equally likely to exhibit
false recall and false recognition and were more prone to display memory
distortion as compared to the control group.
The recovered memory group exhibited the highest false recall and false
recognition. The recovered and repressed
groups also scored higher for schizotypy than the control group. Overall, people with recovered and repressed
alien abduction memories were correlated with also showing levels of
experiencing sleep paralysis, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder,
hypnotic suggestibility and schizotypic features.
I
find this article extremely interesting; it’s about a topic that you rarely
hear about in the world of plausible research.
I find all the abnormal mood disorders associated with claiming to
experience abductions interesting.
Another point in this article I found extremely intriguing is the idea
of sleep paralysis. This is when REM
sleep becomes desynchronized. People
will then wake up and become conscious of full-body paralysis, will experience
hallucinations, buzzing, flashes of light and levitation. I think alien abductions for repressed
memories are just a misattribution of these physiological processes. I also find it interesting that people who
usually report alien encounters have previously just seen TV shows, movies or
read books on the materials. I found an
external validity problem with this study; it had a small population of people
which would be hard to generalize the findings across the
Ornstein, P. A., Ceci, S. J., & Loftus, E. F. (1998).
Adult recollections of childhood abuse: Cognitive and developmental perspectives. Psychology,
Public Policy, and Law, 4, 1025-1051.