Study questions theory that abuse survivors can?t remember traumatic information

Women who were sexually abused as children and suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as adults remember traumatic information just as well as women with no history of abuse and abuse survivors who are psychiatrically healthy, according to a study published last month in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (Vol. 107, No. 4, p. 596?601).

The study contradicts the commonly held theory that sexually abused children develop an "avoidant encoding style" that enables them to disengage their attention from threatening stimuli, such as the perpetrator of the abuse, and thereby fosters a tendency to forget their abuse. Such a theory implies that people with this encoding style would be less likely to remember trauma-related information than other information, says Harvard University psychology professor Richard McNally, PhD, lead author of the current study.

The researchers tested whether women with PTSD who were sexually abused as children have a harder time remembering trauma-related words than women who weren?t abused or women who were abused but do not have PTSD. They presented the women with a list of trauma-related words, such as "molested," positive words, such as "confident," and neutral words, such as "mailbox." After each word the researchers directed participants to either remember or forget the word.

Normally in this "directed forgetting" task, people tend to recall words they are told to remember and forget words they are told to forget. According to the avoidant encoding hypothesis, however, the people with PTSD should avoid remembering trauma-related words even if they were told to remember them and should be especially good at forgetting trauma words they were told to forget.

Instead, the PTSD group had trouble recalling the nontrauma words?even those they were told to remember?and remembered just as many trauma-related words as the other two groups. PTSD may impair the women?s ability to concentrate on the positive and neutral words, but heighten their attention to trauma-related information, the researchers speculate.

"This finding flies in the face of a common hypothesis about memory functioning in people reporting psychiatric impairment as a result of having been sexually abused as a child," says McNally.

?B. Azar