There is an ongoing debate about the origin of recovered memories, traditionally viewed as either false or repressed memories. While false memories are scientifically supported, repressed memories remain controversial. We propose alternative explanations categorized into cognitive, motivational and biological factors to explain recovered memory cases.A

We argue that “repressed memories” – as found in dissociative or psychogenic amnesia – are caused by major stress and trauma conditions and lead to changes in the brain. These alterations can be proven by functional brain imaging.

Dissociative amnesia is a presumed memory phenomenon involving the storage of traumatic experiences, followed by a period of no conscious awareness, with later recall possible. It is also a diagnostic category in the influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This current paper questions whether this extraordinary type of memory mechanism could have evolved in humans, by examining several different scenarios. The article is unable to identify a plausible consistent advantage that would have led to dissociative amnesia genes to spread throughout a population.

This paper offers a philosophical evaluation of the term “repressed memory” and argues that it lacks both reference and sense. As a result, the author recommends its removal from scientific usage.

We discuss how the debate on repressed memories continues to surface in legal settings, sometimes even to suggest avenues of legal reform. In the past years, several European countries have extended or abolished the statute of limitations for the prosecution of sexual crimes. We argue that from a psychological standpoint, these law reforms can be detrimental, particularly when they are done to endorse unfounded psychological theories.

Pathways through which sex that is unpleasant for various reasons can later be falsely remembered as coerced are considered, including roles of emotion in encoding and memory for sexual encounters involving voluntary sexual compliance and ineffective communication of nonconsent.

Experimental cognitive psychology research has failed to support claims that people possess the capacity to repress memories of trauma. Lionel Penrose's viral model of “fads” may explain the persistence (or resurgence) in belief in repression.

People have difficulties remembering ‘remembering’ when the memory was previously recalled in a different context, a phenomenon known as the Forgot-It-All-Along (FIA) effect. Because the FIA effect may explain why people who claim to have recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse could have mentioned the abuse to others in the period they had allegedly forgotten the abuse, the present review provides a brief overview of the literature surrounding the effect and discusses the cognitive mechanisms that may explain the phenomenon.

In this review, we consider research on the acute stress response as it impacts memory formation and consolidation. Given the likelihood that experiences of childhood trauma occur in the context of the acute stress response, this review is relevant when considering phenomena such as repressed and recovered memories. This review may help researchers and clinicians consider how disruption, forgetting, and later remembering of childhood trauma may occur.

In this article, I provide an overview of the types of memories adults recall from their childhoods and the ages at which these memories are believed to have been formed. I detail the fragility of early memories and the adaptive consequences of forgetting and supplanting these memories with newer, more age-appropriate experiences throughout childhood. This includes a brief exegesis of the neurobiological and cognitive underpinnings of early memory development where I show that changes and growth in neural interconnectivity as well as the development of various cognitive structures (e.g., the inception of the cognitive self) help propel the emergence of a mature autobiographical memory system.

Self-reported forgetting of child sexual abuse (CSA) may be misattributed to repressed memory. Using evidence from two longitudinal studies with separate maltreatment samples, we identify memory suppression as a more viable explanation than repression for CSA memory that has been reportedly lost and then retrieved. Important relations between self-reported lost memory of CSA, accuracy of abuse-related memory, childhood non-disclosure of CSA, and adult trauma symptoms emerged, with significant legal implications.

The Think/No-Think (T/NT) task (Anderson & Green, 2001) examines whether intentional suppression of memory retrieval hampers subsequent recall, known as Suppression-Induced Forgetting (SIF). Initially, the T/NT task was proposed as an experimental analogue for repressed memory, particularly when examining SIF with Independent Probes (unrelated cues). However, the present paper argues that the literature on SIF with Independent Probes lacks reliable effect size estimates, may suffer from publication and reporting bias, and faces challenges in studying autobiographical memories, casting doubt on its viability as a model for repression.

One of the main goals in the context of crime-related amnesia is to find methods to distinguish whether it is due to an organic-neurological origin, psychological factors or malingering. Here, we report two homicide cases in which the application of two memory detection techniques, the forced-choice test and the autobiographical implicit association test (aIAT), strongly suggested a malingered amnesia.

A patient with autobiographical memory loss but without gross neurological abnormalities may be diagnosed with dissociative amnesia, i.e., amnesia with a psychological origin. In this article, I argue that the absence of apparent neurological symptoms does not mean that a patient's amnesia is caused by psychological factors. Only when a medical history, neuropsychological testing, and brain scans rule out a neurological origin of the memory loss, a patient may genuinely suffer from dissociative amnesia.