The Verifiability of Recovered Memories of Abuse
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Different ways of remembering sexual abuse - continuous memories, spontaneously recovered memories, and recovered memories following an active search - have been shown to differ in the availability of case-level corroborative evidence. The present study examined whether memory types in delayed sexual abuse statements also differ in terms of verifiability, a statement feature previously associated with differences between truthful and deceptive accounts. Victim statements from archival police files (N = 140) were classified according to how the abuse was remembered. Confirmatory analyses showed that statements based on continuous memories contained more verifiable details than statements based on recovered memories following an active search. Exploratory analyses indicated that details reported following an active search were more often disconfirmed than those reported in continuous or spontaneously recovered memories. Verifiability may extend beyond deception detection paradigms to capture systematic differences associated with memory retrieval and reconstruction processes in delayed sexual abuse reports.
Source: PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7221692677