Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

228 Chapter 
7 
Memory
 
 Children’s Reliability.
The problem of memory reliability becomes even more 
acute when children are witnesses because increasing evidence suggests that chil-
dren’s memories are highly vulnerable to the infl uence of others (Loftus, 1993; 
Douglas, Goldstein, & Bjorklund, 2000). For instance, in one experiment, 5- to 
7-year-old girls who had just had a routine physical examination were shown an 
anatomically explicit doll. The girls were shown the doll’s genital area and asked, 
“Did the doctor touch you here?” Three of the girls who did not have a vaginal or 
anal exam said that the doctor had in fact touched them in the genital area, and 
one of those three made up the detail “The doctor did it with a stick” (Saywitz & 
Goodman, 1990). 
Children’s memories are especially susceptible to infl uence when the situation 
is highly emotional or stressful. For example, in trials in which there is signifi cant 
pretrial publicity or in which alleged victims are questioned repeatedly, often by 
untrained interviewers, the memories of the alleged victims may be infl uenced by 
the types of questions they are asked (Scullin, Kanaya, & Ceci, 2002; Lamb & Gar-
retson, 2003; Quas, Malloy, & Melinder, 2007; Goodman & Quas, 2008).
 Repressed and False Memories: Separating Truth from Fiction.
Consider the case 
of George Franklin Sr., a man charged with murdering his daughter’s playmate. The 
entire case was based on memories of Franklin’s daughter, who claimed that she had 
repressed them until she began to have fl ashbacks of the event two decades later. 
Gradually, the memories became clearer until she recalled her father lifting a rock 
over his head and then seeing her friend covered with blood. On the basis of her 
memories, her father was convicted—but later was cleared of the crime after an 
appeal of the conviction. 
There is good reason to question the validity of repressed memories, recollections 
of events that are initially so shocking that the mind responds by pushing them into 
the unconscious. Supporters of the notion of repressed memory (based on Freud’s 
psychoanalytic theory) suggest that such memories may remain hidden, possibly 
throughout a person’s lifetime, unless they are triggered by some current circum-
stance, such as the probing that occurs during psychological therapy. 
However, memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus maintains that so-called repressed 
memories may well be inaccurate or even wholly false—representing false memory . For 
example, false memories develop when people are unable to recall the source of a 
memory of a particular event about which they have only vague recollections. When 
FIGURE 4 
After viewing an accident 
involving two cars, the participants in a 
study were asked to estimate the speed 
of the two cars involved in the collision. 
Estimates varied substantially, depending 
on the way the question was worded. 
(Source: Loftus & Palmer, 1974.)
10
0
30
20
40
50
Estimated miles per hour
“Smashed into”
“Collided with”
“Bumped into”
“Hit”
“Contacted”