In the current study, the chief aim was to examine people’s claims of dissociative amnesia and contrast this with claims of other types of memory loss (i.e., feigned). At present, we do not know, as is the case with repressed memory, how many people strongly believe in dissociative amnesia. Although the concept of repressed memory is contested in the scientific literature, many people continue to believe in it (e.g., Dodier et al., 2021 Otgaar, Howe, Dodier, et al., 2021 Patihis et al., 2014). The definition of dissociative amnesia bears many similarities to the controversial concept of repressed memories (Otgaar et al., 2019).
Dissociative amnesia disorder manual#
They postulated that most cases did not meet all the requirements of dissociative amnesia that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has set (DSM-5 American Psychiatric Association, 2013) (Mangiulli et al., in press). Furthermore, Mangiulli and colleagues ( in press) recently argued that the majority, if not all, of dissociative amnesia cases reported in the literature during the last twenty years (i.e., 2000–2020) could be better explained by other differential diagnoses (e.g., transient global amnesia TGA) and alternative interpretations (e.g., ordinary forgetting, malingering). One of the primary reasons for its debateable status is that it runs counter to research showing that emotional events are generally well remembered (McNally, 2003 Merckelbach et al., 2003). Overall, our findings suggest that claiming dissociative amnesia goes hand in hand with believing in dissociative amnesia.ĭissociative amnesia refers to an inaccessibility of autobiographical memories with an ostensibly traumatic (dissociative) cause, and it is a controversial psychological phenomenon. Finally, many participants indicated to have at least once claimed to have feigned memory loss in their life, and that they experienced some form of forgetting when trying to retrieve events for which they lied upon. Importantly, many participants believed in the existence of dissociative amnesia, and those who claimed dissociative amnesia indicated even more belief in this phenomenon than the rest of the sample.
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Some claims pertained to amnesia for traumatic autobiographical experiences (e.g., sexual assault), while other claims reflected memory loss for experiences that can be regarded as non-traumatic or non-stressful (e.g., dissociative amnesia for an anniversary). Here, we surveyed a sample from the general population ( N = 1017), revealing that about a tenth ( n = 102) claimed to have experienced dissociative amnesia. Self-reports of dissociative amnesia in the general population, and beliefs about this topic, have so far not been subjected to empirical scrutiny. Dissociative amnesia is one of the most controversial categories in the field of psychiatry and clinical psychology.