ABSTRACT

When examining spontaneously recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, victims report that there had been periods in which they had forgotten the abuse. However, there are sometimes people with whom the victim had spoken about the abuse during the period in which the victim had supposedly forgotten the abuse, suggesting the victim had not forgotten the abuse but the prior recall of the abuse. The underestimation of previous knowledge is termed the forgot-it-all-along effect. The goal of the present study was replicating the results of a laboratory study that had provided a theoretical understanding for the forgot-it-all-along effect by showing that people have difficulties remembering “remembering” when the memory had previously been recalled in a different context. The effect was replicated by using the same neutral context sentences, suggesting the finding was robust. We also extended the experimental design by using positive and negative context sentences, but it did not become smaller when the positive sentences provided the different context or larger when the negative sentences provided the different context. Although the sample sizes were sufficiently large to provide statistical power for the forgot-it-all-along effect, they may not have been sufficiently large to observe the moderation effects of emotional context.

摘要

在检查自发恢复的童年性虐待记忆时，受害者报告说他们曾有一段时间忘记了虐待。然而，有时在受害者被认为忘记虐待期间，受害者曾与人谈论虐待，这表明受害者没有忘记虐待，而是先前回忆起虐待。对先前知识的低估被称为“一劳永逸”效应。本研究的目标是复制一项实验室研究的结果，该研究为“一劳永逸”提供了理论理解通过显示人们在记忆之前在不同的上下文中被回忆时难以记住“记忆”来产生效果。通过使用相同的中性上下文句子复制了该效果，表明该发现是稳健的。我们还通过使用正面和负面的上下文句子扩展了实验设计，但是当正面句子提供不同的上下文时它并没有变小，或者当负面句子提供不同的上下文时它没有变大。尽管样本量足够大，可以为“一劳永逸”效应提供统计功效，但它们可能还不够大，无法观察情绪背景的调节效应。