ABSTRACT
Preparation of this article was supported by National Institute of Mental Health grant MH61268 awarded to the first author.
COGNITION AND EMOTION, 2004, 18(4), 479-493
Are people who report having forgotten their childhood sexual abuse (CSA) characterised by superior ability to inhibit retrieval of disturbing material? To test this hypothesis, we asked adults reporting either repressed, recovered, or continuous memories of CSA or no history of CSA to participate in a directed forgetting experiment (list method). They rated the emotionality of two consecutive lists of trauma-related and positive words. After the first list, the experimenter instructed participants to forget these words, and to continue rating the remaining words. A surprise recall task revealed robust directed forgetting and valence effects: All groups recalled more words from the second list than from the first list, and recalled more trauma words than positive ones. Participants reporting either repressed or recovered memories of CSA did not exhibit superior forgetting of trauma versus positive words relative to the other two groups. Finally, a subsidiary analysis revealed that participants exhibiting a “repressor” coping style (low selfreported anxiety plus high defensiveness) did not exhibit superior directed forgetting of trauma words.
