Introduction: exploring dissociation: setting the course.
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Cognition Disorders↗
Biomedical subjects
Anne P DePrince
Publications and source records attributed to Anne P DePrince.
The relationship between executive attention and dissociation in children.
Dissociation involves disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, and perception. Recent research with adults suggests that dissociation is associated with alterations in attention. Little work, however, has examined the attentional correlates of dissociation in childhood. This study is the first to investigate the specificity of cognitive functions related to dissociation in children. Twenty-four 5- to 8-year-old foster children completed several subtests of the NEPSY: A Developmental Neuropsychological Assessment (Korkman, Kirk, & Kemp, 1998) in the Executive Functioning/ Attention domain. Foster caregivers completed the Child Dissociative Checklist (Bernstein & Putnam, 1986). Consistent with the adult literature, higher levels of childhood dissociation were associated with deficits in tasks requiring inhibition, but not with tasks requiring primarily planning, strategy, or multiple rule sets.
Attention↗
Social cognition and revictimization risk.
The ability to accurately detect violations in social contracts likely helps people to avoid or to withdraw from relationships in which they are at risk of being cheated or harmed. Betrayal trauma theory argues that detecting violations of social contracts may be counter-productive to survival under certain conditions, such as when a victim is dependent on a perpetrator. When dependent on a perpetrator (as in the case of child abuse perpetrated by a caregiver), the victim may be better able to preserve the necessary attachment with the caregiver by remaining unaware of the abuse. Thus, the victim may develop a compromised capacity to detect violations of social contracts in the caregiving relationship. Over time, the victim may develop more generalized problems detecting violations in social exchange rules; in turn, generalized problems in detecting violations of social contracts may increase risk for later victimization. Participants in the current study were asked to detect violations in three types of conditional (if-then) rules: abstract, social contract (rules involving a social exchange), and precautionary (rules involving safety). Young adults who reported experiences of revictimization made more errors on social contract and precautionary problems than a no revictimization group; group performance did not differ for abstract problems, suggesting these findings are not explained by general deficits in conditional reasoning. Pathological dissociation significantly predicted errors on social contract and precautionary problems.
Adolescent↗
Forgetting trauma stimuli.
Previous work reported in this journal suggested that the cognitive capacities of high dissociators are impaired under conditions of focused (selective) attention, but not under conditions of divided attention, compared with the cognitive capacities of low dissociators. Using a directed-forgetting paradigm, the current study demonstrated that under divided-attention demands, high dissociators have impaired memory for words associated with trauma (e.g., incest) but not for neutral words, as compared with low dissociators. In addition, high dissociators reported significantly more trauma history and significantly more betrayal trauma (abuse by a caregiver) than low dissociators. These results are consistent with the proposal that dissociation may aid individuals with histories of betrayal traumas to keep threatening information out of awareness.
Adult↗
What's in a name for memory errors? Implications and ethical issues arising from the use of the term "false memory" for errors in memory for details.
The term "false memories" has been used to refer to suggestibility experiments in which whole events are apparently confabulated and in media accounts of contested memories of childhood abuse. Since 1992 psychologists have increasingly used the term "false memory" when discussing memory errors for details, such as specific words within lists. Use of the term to refer to errors in details is a shift in language away from other terms used historically (e.g., "memory intrusions"). We empirically examine this shift in language and discuss implications of the new use of the term "false memories." Use of the term presents serious ethical challenges to the data-interpretation process by encouraging over-generalization and misapplication of research findings on word memory to social issues.
Adult↗