Am ne sia” for sum mer camps and high school grad u a tion: Mem ory work in creases re ports of prior pe ri ods of re mem ber ing less. Jour nal of Trau matic Stress

Claims regarding amnesia for childhood sexual abuse have often been based on studies of adults ’ responses to questions of the form,“Was there ever a period of time when you remembered less of the abuse than you do now? ” In this ex-periment, 43 adult (mean ageD 42) participants rated their current and prior memories of several nontraumatic childhood/adolescent events. Reports of prior periods of less memory were fairly common. Participants then engaged in “remi-niscence ” or “enhanced ” retrieval activities directed toward remembering more about a selected target event. Following retrieval, 35 % of the reminiscence condi-tion participants reported prior poor memory for the target event, as did 70 % of the enhanced condition. These results highlight the need for appropriate control conditions in retrospective studies of amnesia for childhood trauma. KEY WORDS: childhood sexual abuse; amnesia; forgetting; trauma. Many professionals and members of the public accept the claim that child victims of sexual abuse and other types of trauma often suffer pathological mem-ory loss or amnesia as a direct consequence of the trauma (for critical review