BELIEF ABOUT REPRESSED MEMORY 1 What Do People Really Think of When They Claim to Believe in Repressed Memory? Methodological Middle Ground and Applied Issues Olivier Dodier1, Anne-Laure Gilet1,2, Fabienne Colombel1,2 1Faculté de Psychologie, Université de Nantes, Nantes, France 2Univ Nantes, Univ Angers, Laboratoire de Psychologie des Pays de la Loire (LPPL – EA 4638), Nantes, France Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Olivier Dodier, Faculté de psychologie, Université de Nantes, Chemin de la Censive du Tertre, Nantes Cedex 3, France, [email protected] Word count (with Tables): 5965 This manuscript is a pre-print and is currently under review for publication BELIEF ABOUT REPRESSED MEMORY 2 Abstract What do people really think of when they declare to believe in repressed memory? In two studies (NStudy 1 = 3158; NStudy 2 = 305) using an integrative methodology considering recent methodological discussions, we found that most participants reported to believe in repressed memory. They also appeareD to think of an unconscious mechanism when reporting beliefs in repression, whereas they were more sceptical about deliberate memory suppression. Participants with no memory of childhood abuse expressed more scepticism about unconscious and deliberate mechanisms than those with such memories (Study 1). The order in which the items were presented was not associated with beliefs in the different statements (Study 2). The results are discussed along the lines of survey methodology, which is to what degree are findings about the general public’s beliefs in repression dependent on the questions asked and on design features. Applied issues are also discusseD. Keywords: Repressed memory; Recovered memory; Belief; Childhood abuse; Survey method BELIEF ABOUT REPRESSED MEMORY 3 In the 1990's, in the U.S., the ‘memory wars’ took place. These involveD debates, which occurreD in academia, courtrooms, and in the clinical field, and saw two sides confronting each other. On the one hand, there were those who were convinced that individuals can unconsciously repress traumatic memories, thus becoming inaccessible to retrieval, before recovering them accurately sometimes years later. On the other hand, sceptics considered that traumatic memories are generally very well remembered, and that unconscious repression lackeD scientific evidence (See Ost, 2003, for a complete and balanced overview of the ‘memory wars’ history). Recently, it has been argued that these debates are not over, and that the term ‘repressed memory’ has since been replaced by ‘dissociative amnesia’ (Otgaar et al., 2019). One of the reasons why these debates would not be over is that the belief in the existence of repression is still alive in the 21st century among both clinicians, therapists and the general public (e.g., Ost, Easton, Hope, French, & Wright, 2017; Ost, Wright, Easton, Hope, & French, 2013; Otgaar et al., 2019; Patihis, Ho, Tingen, Lilienfeld, & Loftus, 2014), while memory researchers are still mostly sceptical about the existence of this phenomenon (Patihis et al., 2014; Patihis, Ho, Loftus, & Herrera, 2018). The public's beliefs about repressed memories have implications at several levels: for example, accepting the possibility of having repressed memories could facilitate the engagement of patients in therapy dedicated to recovering such memories. Jury members in court convinced that childhood abuse memories can be repressed could lead to a conviction of a defendant on this basis without considering the possibility of false memories. It is then important to explore the general public's beliefs about this controversial concept to estimate educational needs. Recently, discussions have emerged regarding appropriate methodologies to explore beliefs about repression (Brewin et al., 2019). It has been argued that how survey participants were asked questions in past studies does not provide accurate access to what they really BELIEF ABOUT REPRESSED MEMORY 4 believe. Brewin et al. (2019) proposed to participants an original statement on repression (i.e., “Traumatic experiences can be repressed for many years and then recovered”) as well as an alternative statement describing the phenomenon of memory suppression, that involves a voluntary memory avoidance mechanism (i.e., “Traumatic experiences can be deliberately blocked for many years and then recovered”). Finding similar percentages of agreement with these two statements (i.e., repression statement: 76%, n = 122; memory suppression statement: 74%, n = 119), the authors assumeD that when individuals state that they believe in repression, they do not think of an unconscious mechanism, but instead of a deliberate one. Otgaar and colleagues (in press) criticized the method used by pointing out the absence of a statement that included the unconscious nature of repressed memory. They proposed a different statement to three groups of participants: the repression statement (Group 1), the memory suppression statement (Group 2), and the unconscious repression statement (Group 3). They found similar percentages of agreement between the three statements (i.e., Study 1, repression statement: 72%, n = 54; memory suppression statement: 70%, n = 55; unconscious repression statement: 59%, n = 45; Study 2: unconscious repression statement: 67%, n = 53), suggesting that people do endorse the idea of an unconscious repression mechanism. Study 1 Otgaar et al. (in press) used a between-subject design to avoid any order-of-statement effect, consistent with the limitation raised by Brewin et al. (2019) who had used a within- subject design. Such a choice has of course limited any order effect, but also limits the interpretation of the results to differences between groups, and is unlikely to reveal at an individual level what people mean by “repression”. Thus, in an attempt to find methodological middle ground, we wanteD to explore the levels of the general public endorsement to the three statements at a within-subject level. BELIEF ABOUT REPRESSED MEMORY 5 We also sought to explore the links between the different types of memories that people may have of childhood abuse (i.e., no memories, continuous memories, recovered memories, and ongoing memories but later reinterpreted as abuse) and levels of endorsement of the concept of repression. Indeed, people who remember childhood abuse may feel more involved in the issue of traumatic memories, especially people who have recovered such memories, since the concept of repression is intrinsically relateD to childhood trauma (cf. the memory wars, or the Freudian origins of the repressed memory hypothesis, Freud, 1893– 1895/1953). Method Participants We retrieveD unpublished data from a larger French-language questionnaire conducted in December 2019 devoted to explore the prevalence of recovered and continuous memories of child abuse in the general public. Participants were recruited using online social networks (i.e., Twitter and Facebook). Initially, 5044 adults began to complete the questionnaire. We pre-excluded 1585 participants who answered only questions related to age, gender or education level, 16 participants who reported lying about their age to participate in the study, and 97 participants who reported responding so inattentively that we could exclude their responses from the analyses. Note that this decision to exclude participants was made a priori from the data collection and analyses. Because the items for which we present the analyses in the present article were at the end of the questionnaire, 188 additional participants had stopped completing the questionnaire beforehand. Thus, our sample population consisted of 3158 participants, with a mean age of 34.4 years old (SD = 11.2, median 33.0, range 18–75). In total, 52.3% (n = 1653) were female, 46.9% (n = 1480) were male, and 0.8% (n = 25) reported being of another gender (e.g., non-binary). In terms of educational level, 9.7% (n = 307) of the participants reported a high school degree, 13.4% (n = 422) reported a 2-year BELIEF ABOUT REPRESSED MEMORY 6 university degree, 13.2% (n = 417) reported a 3-year university degree, 9.8% (n = 310) reported a 4-year university degree, 41.2% (n = 1301) a master's degree, 10.5% (n = 333) a Ph.D./M. D, and 2.2% (n = 68) reported another education level (e.g., vocational high school). To explore the beliefs in repression, unconscious repression and memory suppression in the different groups of “memory of child abuse” participants, we initially asked the question "Have you ever recovered a memory of being abused as a child, when you had no previous memory of such abuse? Participants were given the option of answering “Yes”, “No”, or “I don't know/don't know for sure”. Thereafter, we asked them to specify what they really meant by their answer, to identify potential false positives and false negatives (see Dodier, Patihis, & Payoux, 2019). Thus, we were able to group the participants into five groups, with the following breakdown (see Supplementary Material for the exact wording of the follow-up questions): continuous memory of child abuse (7.7%, n = 243), continuous memories that were later reinterpreted as child abuse (13.4%, n = 424), recovered memories of child abuse that participants knew about before they remembered them (3.8%, n = 120), recovered memories of child abuse that participants did not know about before they remembered them (2.2%, n = 70), and no memories of child abuse (72.9%, n = 2301). It should be noted that participants had the opportunity at this