CREATING CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

After decades of deliberate attempts to change people's memories for t he details of events that they had observed in the past, researchers t urned their attention to the task of planting entirely false childhood memories. One way to accomplish this is to enlist the help of family members to suggest to subjects that their relatives saw the event bein g suggested. Using this method, researchers have succeeded in convinci ng adult subjects that as children they had a variety of complex exper iences, such as being lost in a shopping mall for an extended time, be ing hospitalized overnight, or spilling punch at a family wedding. Ind ividuals with higher dissociative capacity and higher hypnotizability have been shown to be more susceptible to these suggestions. Possible mechanisms by which false memories are created are described. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.