Brefie said:
Hmmm....seems to me the crisis was 4 months old when they were asked again and again about their daughter's murder. If they truly wanted to help, they would have done so before then. It's absolutely inexcusable.
I totally disagree with that first sentence. I am willing to bet there are millions upon millions of innocent people whose recollection of events never waivered.
You can also find good information about memory and crisis in some of Ann Rule's books and Jeanne Boylan's "Portraits of Guilt."
http://www.jaapl.org/cgi/content/full/33/1/71
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There are at least two studies in patients with PTSD, however, showing an increase in memory distortion on so-called "false memory tasks."19,20 No study directly addresses the relationship between traumatic memories and recall accuracy.
More recently, however, a prospective investigation of human eyewitness memory for highly stressful events indicates that under conditions of extreme stress, human memory is extremely poor.21
Related to the question of the accuracy of memory for traumatic events is a study showing that memories of traumatic events in Persian Gulf War veterans changed over time. This study was entered as scientific evidence that memory for traumatic events is inconsistent, and an author of the study, Dr. Charles A. Morgan, testified at the trial. The evidence for a conclusion that memory is more fallible in victims with PTSD (thus potentially negating the testimony of Witness A) that was outlined in the trial includes greater false recall on false memory tasks, deficits in hippocampal-based memory pointing to the possibility of hippocampal damage, and inconsistency of traumatic event recall. Southwick et al.22 and their research team conducted a set of studies demonstrating that memory of traumatic events is subject to considerable alteration over time. In the first study, Gulf War veterans were interviewed one month, two years, and six years after returning from the war.22 When requestioned the first time, combat veterans changed their answers to specific questions about their trauma exposure. The veterans were more likely to say, after being interviewed at a two-year point, that they had seen more trauma than originally described, rather than less. Although there was alteration in memory in nearly all subjects, the greatest changes were seen in veterans suffering from PTSD, and the more PTSD symptoms subjects had, the more they changed their answers. In the six-year follow-up study, alterations in memory (increase or decrease) were also significantly related to PTSD symptomatology.
All subjects were absolutely convinced that their answers were right, even though they changed their answers each time and were sure that each answer was correct. The answers provided by the subjects were considered "inconsistent" rather than "inaccurate," because the research team had no way of knowing which accounts were true. Separate studies by Roemer et al.23 and by North et al.24 have shown that many individuals with PTSD symptoms on one-year follow-up may deny symptoms they had previously endorsed. Roemer and associates23 reported that, while Gulf War veterans with and without PTSD were inconsistent when reporting trauma exposure, veterans with PTSD provided significantly more inconsistencies than people without PTSD. As in the study conducted by Southwick et al.,22 Roemer found that the more PTSD-type symptoms subjects endorsed, the more inconsistent they were when reporting traumatic events. Studies by Foa et al.25 and van der Kolk and Fisler26 also show that female rape victims may change their story to a significant degree and that memory in people who have highly stressful, life-threatening experiences may be "unorganized." It is possible that victims could become more consistent over time (but not necessarily more accurate) if they found a comfortable way of telling their stories (Ref. 1, Trial transcript, p 1009, November 10, 1998).
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