I have repeatedly, for years, many more times than once, called out Elizabeth Loftus and her claims on child memory.
At that "many more" link, I first estimated that she may have made as much as $500,000 for her "expert witness" testimony in courtrooms. I also called her out for erecting what I called a stereotypically Freudian version of memory repression and using that as a strawman.
And, now, without her being named by name, it turns out that claims like hers are overblown.
The two authors, a post-doc researcher and a professor of child psychology, both at University College London, did metadata type work on 49 studies covering almost 40,000 people.
This:
Over an average gap of two and a half years, people’s memories of maltreatment barely budged, supporting the case for using a single time-point assessment in both research and clinical practice. That said, we still don’t know whether this stability holds over longer stretches of time, so more research is needed.
Is the key.
So, unless there's a particular psychologist trying to ramp up their career with something like ritual satanic abuse claims, listen to the kids, just like listening to the women.
The authors do introduce caveats, but these caveats still don't give carte blanche to Loftus-type claims:
That’s not to say memory is perfect. About one in five people did change their response over time. This shouldn’t be read as evidence that someone was lying, though.
Memories can shift for all sorts of reasons, such as how someone comes to interpret what happened to them, ordinary quirks of memory, how comfortable someone feels disclosing sensitive information in a given setting, or simple human error.
This is why any record of maltreatment disclosure, whether in research or in clinical practice, should also capture the context in which it was made. This may well shape how consistently that account holds up later.
There you are.
Near the end, the pair has one more observation that pretty directly kneecaps Loftus:
Finally, we found that while adults’ memories of childhood maltreatment were very stable over time, young people’s memories of maltreatment were less stable and decreased over longer gaps between assessments.
Boom.
