People are often treated as unreliable narrators of their own pasts, and this skepticism persists, especially when it comes to emotionally charged childhood experiences.
Researchers have long worried that memories of abuse and neglect can change depending on a person’s mood, mental health, and current circumstances, meaning that what someone tells a researcher, doctor, or social worker one year may not match what they say the next year.
Our new research published in Nature Mental Health suggests these fears may be overblown. We found that reports of child maltreatment remained very stable over time, at least over several years.
Child abuse includes experiences of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse or neglect. Most research on how these experiences affect mental and physical health relies on retrospective self-reports. Basically, it involves asking people to describe what happened based on their memory.
These reports consistently show stronger associations with mental health outcomes than reports from external observers. However, this raised an unpleasant question. Are these stronger links real, or are they artifacts that reflect people’s current moods and color how they remember the past?
Whether memories of abuse are stable is not just an academic curiosity. It has serious real consequences. As people’s accounts of what happened to them change over time, a single snapshot study can misclassify those who were abused and those who were not, obscuring the findings and making it difficult to determine what is actually causing poor outcomes.
The risks are just as high outside the lab. Clinical, legal and social care decisions can depend on a description of someone’s childhood experiences, which is often given only once.
To test this, the researchers asked the same people about their childhood experiences at two or more points in time and compared their responses. We compiled 49 such studies involving around 40,000 people to see how consistent people’s memories really are.
I found them to be surprisingly consistent. Even after an average gap of 2.5 years, people’s memories of abuse have largely faded, supporting the need to use single-point assessments in both research and clinical practice. However, it remains to be seen whether this stability is maintained over a long period of time and further research is required.
That doesn’t mean your memory is perfect. About one in five people changed their response over time. However, this should not be interpreted as evidence that someone was lying.
Memories can change for all sorts of reasons, including how someone interprets what happened to them, normal quirks of memory, how comfortable they feel disclosing sensitive information in certain circumstances, and simple human error.
This is why records disclosing abuse, whether in research or clinical practice, should also document the context in which it took place. This can shape how consistently that account is maintained later on.
Memory also depends on the type of abuse
It also turns out that some experiences are more difficult to recall consistently than others. Reports of neglect are changed more frequently than reports of abuse. This is probably because abuse tends to involve specific, concrete events that become entrenched in memory, whereas neglect often means something: a lack of care, attention, and resources that simply wasn’t there. It’s harder to consistently remember what didn’t happen than what did.
Also, in large, population-representative studies, memory was less stable compared to people who volunteered for research or were recruited through clinical services. One explanation is that people who enroll in research on this topic have already spent time reflecting on their past and may be used to answering these types of questions consistently.
People with poor mental health also think about negative childhood experiences more often and reflect on them more deeply during treatment, making their memories more accessible and more likely to be reported consistently.
Finally, we found that adults’ memories of childhood maltreatment are highly stable over time, whereas youth’s memories of maltreatment are less stable and decline as the interval between assessments increases.
This likely reflects the fact that children’s memory systems are still developing. Early memories may be less firmly entrenched and may leave more room for reinterpretation as children grow and come to understand their experiences differently.
Our findings have hopeful implications. Childhood and adolescence can be particularly valuable windows for providing support after trauma. Treatments such as trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy work by helping people reinterpret and weave traumatic memories into their broader life stories in ways that alleviate long-term suffering.
If young people’s memories are truly malleable, that suggests that adolescence may be a particularly powerful time to process traumatic memories before they become consolidated into more fixed forms.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
