ارتباط بین حساسیت به حافظه کاذب، تفکیکى، و اعتقاد ماوراء الطبیعه و تجربه

One hundred participants completed a News Coverage Questionnaire concerning personal memories of where they were, what they were doing and who they were with when footage of dramatic news events was first shown on television, as well as asking them to recall details of the footage itself. These news items included four events that are known to have been captured on film and one item concerning non-existent footage of the bombing of a nightclub in Bali. Overall, 36% of respondents reported false memories of the alleged footage of the Bali bombing. Participants reporting false memories were found to score significantly higher than those who did not report such memories on the Australian Sheep–Goat Scale, on various subscales of the Anomalous Experiences Inventory (Belief, Experience and Ability) and on the Dissociative Experiences Scale, supporting the hypothesis that believers in the paranormal may be more susceptible to false memories than non-believers.

In recent years a great deal of research has been carried out to investigate the phenomenon of false memory creation. Interest in false memory research largely began in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the explosion in cases of falsely recovered memories as a result of questionable therapeutic techniques (e.g., Loftus and Ketcham, 1994 and Ofshe and Watters, 1994). Experimental psychologists such as Loftus (e.g., 1993) have demonstrated the ease with which false memories of an event from childhood (e.g., being lost in a shopping mall) can be implanted. Such studies clearly show how fallible and susceptible to suggestion our memories can be. Researchers are currently developing new paradigms to investigate false memories. One such paradigm involves probing participants’ memories for television footage of emotionally charged events. Crombag, Wagenaar, and van Koppen (1996), for example, questioned 193 people about the crashing of an El Al Boeing 747 into a block of flats in Amsterdam. The crash occurred on 4 October 1992, and respondents were questioned 10 months later. The crash was an extremely high profile and traumatic event and was headline news for many days on Dutch television. However, there was no recorded footage of the actual crash. Participants were asked to complete a questionnaire about the crash and were told, “We want to test your memory for a particular detail of this disaster.” The participants were told that they would be given three factual questions followed by “the test question” which concerned the length of time it took before fire broke out. The key question, however, (i.e., “Did you see the television film of the moment the plane hit the apartment building?”) was presented as one of the factual questions. Crombag et al. found that 107 respondents (55%) reported that they had seen the actual crashing of the plane into the apartment block. Furthermore, 82% of respondents completed the fourth question relating to specific details about the fire. Intrigued by this finding, Crombag et al. were able to replicate the results with a second questionnaire distributed to a new set of respondents. In this second study, participants were asked to complete questions relating to highly specific details about the crash, e.g., at what angle the plane crashed into the building, and what happened to the plane after impact. In this case they found an even higher percentage of false reports. Of the 93 participants, 66% responded that they had seen the film footage and most of these participants were willing to answer the detailed questions relating to the crash. For example, of the 61 participants who answered this question, 67% were willing to describe the angle at which the plane hit the building. This phenomenon has become known as “crashing memories”. In a similar experiment, Ost, Vrij, Costall, and Bull (2002) were able to replicate these findings using another traumatic and very public event. In 1997, Diana, the Princess of Wales, and her companion, Dodi Fayed, were killed in a car crash in Paris. No film footage of the actual crash has ever surfaced and it is unlikely that any exists. In line with previous findings, Ost et al. found that of the 45 participants who had been asked if they had seen the actual video footage of the crash in which Diana and Dodi died, 44% (i.e., N = 20) reported that they had seen the film. It appears that almost any traumatic public event can be used to explore this phenomenon. Granhag, Stromwall, and Billings (2003), for example, found that 55% of respondents claimed to have seen non-existent film footage of the sinking of the Estonia Ferry. Ost, Hogbin, and Granhag (2006) found that 39% of respondents claimed to have seen non-existent CCTV footage of the explosion in a Bali nightclub in which many tourists were killed. Jelicic et al. (2005) found that 66% of respondents erroneously claimed to have seen the actual footage of the assassination of the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn and that 23% claimed to be able to describe specific details about the shooting. Given the high numbers of erroneous responses, how are we to explain such intriguing results? Logically, it is plausible that such dramatic events might be captured on film, which might lead the respondent to make false claims. Therefore respondents may simply be assuming that they have seen the footage because it seems highly probable that they would have done so given the ubiquitous nature of the media. The widespread news coverage of such events is bound to lead people to imagine the scene in their mind’s eye which in itself may lead to the formation of false memories via what has been referred to as the imagination inflation effect ( Garry, Manning, Loftus, & Sherman, 1996). Clearly the role of individual differences may be influential in determining the tendency to report false memories. It has been shown that a number of psychological variables correlate with susceptibility to false memories (see French, 2003, for a review). Dissociativity, for example, is often cited as being related to the development of false memories (Brown, Scheflin, & Hammond, 1997) and with memory suggestibility (e.g., Hyman & Billings, 1998). However, the findings with respect to the relationship between dissociativity and susceptibility to false memories are somewhat mixed. Ost et al. (2002), for example, did not find any significant difference in scores on the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES; Bernstein & Putnam, 1986) between those who claimed to have seen the film of the Diana crash and those who did not. Furthermore, it has been shown that several variables (including dissociativity, absorption, fantasy proneness and hypnotisability) that have been reported to correlate with susceptibility to false memories also correlate with both belief in the paranormal and tendency to report personal experiences of the paranormal (French, 2003). This raises the intriguing possibility that believers in the paranormal may show a heightened susceptibility to false memories compared to non-believers and, by implication, that at least some reports of ostensibly paranormal experiences may be based upon false memories. It is always possible, of course, that the causal relationship is in the opposite direction, with at least some false memories being caused by paranormal belief (see French & Wilson, in press-a). Although the relationship between susceptibility to false memories and belief in and experience of the paranormal has not always been confirmed in the relatively few published attempts to directly investigate this issue, such inconsistency may reflect the use of inappropriate paradigms (French, 2003). Therefore one of the additional aims of this study is to explore the potential relationship between susceptibility to false memories and paranormal belief/experience using a paradigm that has to date not been employed in investigating this issue. In line with previous research, this study used a News Coverage Questionnaire (NCQ) asking for detailed answers to questions concerning footage of dramatic news events. These items included four known pieces of footage (e.g., the World Trade Center collapse) and a piece of non-existent footage, the supposed CCTV footage of the explosion in a Bali nightclub. Participants were also asked to complete the DES and two questionnaires related to belief in and experience of the paranormal (the Australian Sheep–Goat Scale, ASGS, Thalbourne, 1995, and the Anomalous Experiences Inventory, AEI, Kumar, Pekala, & Gallagher, 1994). Intuitively, one might expect susceptibility to false memories to be more strongly correlated with reported experience of paranormal events than to paranormal belief. This is because a susceptibility to false memories might lead directly to the reporting of ostensibly paranormal experiences which are based upon false memories. Belief in the paranormal, on the other hand, may be based upon a number of reasons in addition to personal experience, including media coverage of paranormal topics and reports from trusted others (French & Wilson, in press-b). Therefore, the main hypotheses of this study are (a) that a substantial minority of participants will report having seen an event that they could not possibly have witnessed (i.e., non-existent CCTV video footage of the Bali bombing); and (b) that those reporting such false memories will score higher than those who do not on the DES and on measures of belief in, and personal experience of, the paranormal (i.e., the ASGS and various subscales of the AEI). Furthermore, multiple regression will be used to assess the relative importance of dissociativity, and belief in and experience of the paranormal in predicting susceptibility to false memories.