NCJ Number
176182
Journal
Child Abuse and Neglect Volume: 22 Issue: 12 Dated: December 1998 Pages: 1203-1216
Date Published
1998
Length
14 pages
Annotation
Questionnaires were used to collect information from 553 college students to test several hypotheses that might help account for the large amount of variation that individuals report in the general quality of their childhood memory and the nature of the memories.
Abstract
The research hypotheses were that dysfunction in the family or origin would be associated with poorer childhood memory, that current depressed mood would be associated with impaired childhood recall and the recall of negative memories, and that the content of recovered childhood memories would be disproportionately negative because they included a significant number of memories that had been repressed or dissociated. Twenty-seven percent of the participants reported a history of child abuse. The participants reported substantial variation in the general quality of their childhood memories and also a wide variety of different types of experiences for both their first childhood memories and the recovered memories that most had from their childhoods. In addition, dysfunction in the family of origin was weakly associated with poorer general quality of childhood memory. However, as a whole, the study resulted in few significant findings. The findings produced only week support for some of the factors hypothesized to distort autobiographical memory and indicated that the substantial individual memory reported by college students remains poorly understood. Tables and 43 references (Author abstract modified)