Consciousness and Cognition

Extending a strategy previously used by Clancy, Schacter, McNally, and Pitman (2000), we administered a neutral and a trauma-related version of the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm to a sample of women reporting recovered (n = 23) or repressed memories (n = 16) of childhood sexual abuse (CSA), women reporting having always remembered their abuse (n = 55), and women reporting no history of abuse (n = 20). We found that individuals reporting recovered memories of CSA are more prone than other par-ticipants to falsely recalling and recognizing neutral words that were never presented. Moreover, our study is the first to show that this finding even held when trauma-related material was involved. Correlational analyses revealed that fantasy proneness, but not self-reported traumatic experiences and dissociative symptoms were related to false recall and false recognition. 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved