Adults who have trouble remembering incidents of childhood sexual abuse have been led by therapists to believe that their memory difficulties result from

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The option D, repression, is the best choice as it suggests that the difficulty adults have in recalling incidents of childhood sexual abuse is due to repression - a defense mechanism by which people forget traumatic events as a way of coping with the painful emotions associated with them. There is ongoing debate over the validity of repressed memories, but some therapists believe that repressed memories can be recovered through therapy, while others argue that such memories may be false or influenced by suggestion. The other options are less likely to account for memory difficulties associated with childhood sexual abuse. Memory storage failure and proactive interference imply that memory is present but inaccessible, whereas the misinformation effect refers to how post-event information can distort an individual's memory of an event, neither of which explains why individuals cannot remember incidents of childhood sexual abuse.

Adults Who Have Trouble Remembering Incidents of Childhood Sexual Abuse