Questioning the Reliability of Recovered Memories in Court

Recovered Memories are not Reliable or Credible Student`s Name Professor’s Name: Date Recovered Memories are not Reliable or Credible Introduction Repressed memory has existed since 350 B.C. In the contemporary society, we are aware of memoir. There are two diverse types’ memories, such a short term memory, and long term memory and how we can react with memories, like repression. Recently, repressed memories have been questioned if they are truly valid in the psychology field, many confusing them as false memories. Repression is the action of restraining a thought or feeling to initially forget it. False memory is remembering events that did not happen. The paper will constitute 10 articles that will provide and prove more information and evidences to show that repressed memories are valid. The purpose of this argument is to assess the articles for their value and relevance to the validity of repressed memories. Problems with the memory, creation of false memories during intervention, and lack of evidence to back their usefulness makes recovered memories unreliable and should not be presented as a credible source of evidence in court. Most people remember bad things that happened to them when they children but in some cases extreme trauma will be forgotten. When the forgetting becomes more extreme , a dissociative disorder may develop such as dissoactive fugue , dissociative amnesia or depersonalization disorder. Are the recovered memories necessarily true? There is a lot of debate about this. Some therapists who work with trauma survivors believe that the memories are true because they are accompanied by such extreme emotions. Other therapists have reported that some of their patients have recovered memories that could not have been true (a memory of being beheaded, for example).Some groups have claimed that therapists are "implanting memories" or causing false memories in vulnerable patients by suggesting that they are victims of abuse when there was no abuse. Some therapists appear to have persuaded patients that their symptoms were due to abuse when they did not know this was true. This was never considered good therapeutic practice, and most therapists are careful not to suggest a cause for a symptom unless the cause is reported by the patient. There is some research to suggest that false memories for minor trauma can be created in the laboratory. In one study, suggestions were made that children had gotten lost in a shopping mall. Many of the children later came to believe that this was a real memory. Note: It is unethical to suggest memories of severe trauma in a laboratory setting. Retrieval Process Repressed memory is associated with diverse patterns in unbiased activity. The evidence from the article “Memory Repression: Brain mechanisms underlying Dissociative Amnesia” (Kikuchi et al., 2010), confirms that repressed memory in dissociative amnesia is linked with a modified outline of neural actions. The facts that repression and dissociative amnesia are very similar basing on their meanings, is a vivid indication of its validity. Dissociative amnesia is thought to reveal reversible discrepancy in memory retrieval perhaps as a result of memory repression. Another argument that can confirm this claim is the pre-frontal cortex which has a fundamental key function in preventing the action of the hippocampus in memory repression (Kikuchi et al., 2010). According to this argument, dissociative amnesia typically pursues a demanding occasions and cannot be attributed to explicit brain injure and major parts of retrieval process is connected to repressed memory. People’s attachment approaches manipulates memory development. The brainwashing and retrieval of information based on the actions that occurred can justify the validity of the repressed memories. This evidence is outlined in the article “Does attachment anxiety promote the encoding of false memories? An investigation of the processes linking adult attachment to memory errors” (Hudson & Fraley, 2018) which demonstrated how people in high attachment evasion position their attention away from connection stimuli and be unsuccessful encode. Anxious people are more probable to structure false memories which are not the case for the repressed memories. The false memories are usually manipulated because of att