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The development of memory
Published in David Cohen, How the child's mind develops, 2017
Freud developed an intriguing theory to explain what he called childhood amnesia – or forgetting most events from childhood. Freud argued that childhood amnesia is the result of the distressing psychological conflicts the child faces. Freud claimed young boys have an Oedipus complex and young girls have an Electra complex. Very crudely, Freud claimed the young boy hates his father and wants to replace him, so that his mother will love only him; the young girl hates her mother and wants to replace her, so that she will have her father’s undivided attention. These fierce sexual wishes are partly conscious, partly unconscious. By the age of 3 or 4, the child knows that they are both hopeless and sinful. So the child represses many of the feelings and memories involved.
The Frequency of False Allegations of Child Sexual Abuse: A Critical Review
Published in Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 2018
William O’Donohue, Caroline Cummings, Brendan Willis
Sjoberg and Lindblad (2002) conducted a study to explore children’s disclosure of sexual abuse and obstacles to such disclosures. Researchers obtained police interviews of 10 children who were victims of at least one act of sexual abuse by a single perpetrator. The interviews were conducted between 3 and 23 months after the last alleged sexual abuse incident. The acts of sexual abuse were also videotaped and these recordings were obtained, following the arrest of the perpetrator. Researchers compared the child’s report of what happened to that of what was recorded. Out of the 10 children, none reported acts of sexual abuse that were not corroborated by video evidence, though 3 reported other forms of maltreatment not documented on the videos. Three children reported difficulty with remembering the incidents, either due to what the researchers judged to be active suppression or “normal” childhood amnesia. Four children reported they did not want to talk about the abuse, though three eventually did after either the interviewer utilized leading questions or being asked whether someone told the child not to tell. It is unclear the exact number of children who disclosed or the number who failed to, even after usage of leading and suggestive questioning. It is important to note that the children in the study were not randomly selected and are not representative of the general population, casting doubt on the generalizability of the false allegation rate. However, this study does shed some important light on underreporting sexual abuse and thus a situation of allegation being false in that it is not being made.
Painful reminders: Involvement of the autobiographical memory system in pediatric postsurgical pain and the transition to chronicity
Published in Canadian Journal of Pain, 2022
Anna Waisman, Maria Pavlova, Melanie Noel, Joel Katz
Throughout early life, episodic autobiographical memory is associated with a more gradual developmental trajectory than semantic memory.40 In particular, infants develop semantic autobiographical memory before episodic memory,41,42 with the former potentially providing a foundation for the latter.43 Because of what has been called “infantile amnesia” and ”childhood amnesia,” beginning around 6 years of age, humans show an inability to recall episodic memories for events from before the age of 2 to 4.42,44–47 A prospective study by Peterson et al.46 found that in a sample of children aged 4 to 9 years old, younger children forgot most of their baseline memories, with the greatest amount of forgetting occurring in the first 2 years, whereas older children did not. Younger children also had more inconsistencies in their memories at subsequent assessments 2 and 8 years later. These findings suggest that age 6 to 7 years seems to be a defining point for children’s ability to remember and maintain consistency in the recollections of their earliest memories. Interestingly, other prospective studies by this research group have shown that as children get older, they postdate their memories for events that were previously assigned earlier dates. Therefore, it is possible that our earliest memories may be even older than we believe.48,49 An alternative hypothesis on the etiology of infantile/childhood amnesia posits that immaturity of certain memory-related structures (e.g., dentate gyrus of the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex) during these early developmental years precludes memories from forming in the first place.42,50 The emergence of episodic memory later on in early childhood is often attributed to the maturation of these brain structures, along with influences from higher-order cognitive abilities such as executive functioning,51 language development,52 sense of self53 and theory of mind,54,55 and cultural and social factors.41,52