Reports of Recovered Memories in Therapy, Informed Consent, and Generalizability: Response to Commentaries

Abstract

We respond to various comments on our article, which reported prevalence percentages of reports of recovered memories in therapy. We consider arguments against informed consent in therapy, and conclude we are in favor of informed consent that includes information about research on the malleability of memory. We note some useful suggestions from commentators, such as future research investigating iatrogenic outcomes of those who report recovered memories, and investigating whether therapy-induced recovered memories are also an issue in various other countries. We understand there are questions as to whether our sample was representative of the adult population of the United States, but we maintain that such questions can be investigated empirically and we could not find much evidence of systematic divergence. We investigated representativeness on gender, ethnicity, SES, and age, and made adjustments where possible. Future research should investigate reports of recovered memory in other general public samples.

A bibliometric analysis of the recovered memory controversy in the 21st century

“…The papers from the 21st century dealing with repressed and/or recovered memories were published from 2001 (Bornstein & Muller, ; Cannell, Hudson, & Pope, ; Coleman, Stevens, & Reeder, ; Dale, ; Davis, Loftus, & Follette, ; DelMonte, ; Esterson, ; Kaplan & Manicavasagar, ; Lalonde, Hudson, Gigante, & Pope, ; McNally, ; McNally et al, ; Pettifor, Crozier, & Chew, ; Porter, Birt, Yuille, & Hervé, ; Sadoff, ) up to 2018 (Brand et al, ; Brand, Collins, & McEwen, ; Chiu, , ; Dodier & Tomas, ; Efrati et al, ; Goodman, Gonzalves, & Wolpe, ; Loftus & Teitcher, ; Lynn, Merckelbach, & Polizzi, ; Merckelbach & Patihis, ; Page & Morrison, ; Patihis, Ho, Loftus, & Herrera, ; Patihis & Pendergrast, , ; Patihis & Place, ; Shaw & Vredeveldt, ).…”