Teaching psychology students to change (or correct) controversial beliefs about memory works

DOI

Therapists, judges, law enforcement, and students often believe in the existence of automatic and unconscious repression. Such a belief can be perilous as it might lead therapists to suggestively search for repressed memories leading to false memories. Recovering therapy-induced false memories of criminal acts can have serious consequences. Here, we tested whether erroneous beliefs in repressed memories can be corrected. Surveying two cohorts of Forensic and Legal Psychology Master’s students, we examined whether education about the science of (eyewitness) memory can correct erroneous beliefs in repressed memories. Students assessed memory statements before taking a course on eyewitness memory, six weeks after the course exam, and 18 or 6 months later, respectively (Ns = 33-74 per cohort and measurement). As expected, students in both cohorts on average initially strongly agreed with the statement that memories of traumatic events can be unconsciously blocked, but strongly disagreed with the statement after the course. Belief-corrections also persisted after the longer delay. These findings show that educating people about the science of (eyewitness) memory can be effective in correcting false and controversial memory beliefs in general and the existence of repressed memories in specific.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/DYNSCY
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/DYNSCY
Provenance
Creator Sauerland, Melanie ORCID logo; Otgaar, Henry ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Sauerland, Melanie; faculty data manager FPN
Publication Year 2020
Rights CC0 Waiver; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
OpenAccess true
Contact Sauerland, Melanie (Maastricht University); faculty data manager FPN (Maastricht University)
Representation
Resource Type experimental data; Dataset
Format application/x-spss-sav; application/pdf
Size 8102; 71050; 8572; 70208; 90739
Version 1.0
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences