An apparent recollection of an event that did not actually occur, especially one of childhood sexual abuse that arises during psychotherapy or psychoanalysis.
subjects can be very confident about the accuracy of their false memories
Example sentencesExamples
- Several professional organizations are now cautioning therapists that by being too directive they might inadvertently be implanting false memories in their clients.
- Suggestion may even induce false memories of abuse.
- A handful of parents whose grown-up children had not recanted also sued their offsprings' therapists, claiming that false memories had been planted during the therapeutic process.
- In any experiment some subjects will sometimes be very confident that their false memory is actually true and report the memory as being quite vivid.
- Loftus took issue with our recommendation for the use of empirically based cues in the credibility assessment, making the reasonable argument that false memories often share similarities with true memories.