The questionable reliability of childhood memories

And this is where the memory breaks
Economist

How was your childhood? did you like school Was your little brother your mother's favorite? Was your father too strict? Did you prefer books to sports? Even if you think the answers to these questions are clear to you, there is a big chance that you are wrong. In fact, a stranger offering a wild guess has about the same chances as you of getting a correct answer.

At least that's what Dr. Daniel Ofer claims, a lecturer in psychiatry at Northwestern University's School of Medicine in Chicago. Dr. Ofer located 67 men he interviewed in 1962 when they were 14-year-old boys as part of a study on American teenagers. 34 years later he asked the research subjects, who were now 48 years old, to recall their youth and answer the same questions they answered then. The differences between the answers were very large. Dr. Ofer concluded that when people grow older, they see the past undergo a drastic change. His findings are published this month in the journal "Journal Psychiatry of Child and Adolescent

The problem is not in the biographical details. Someone who grew up in the comforts of the middle class in St. Louis, for example, will not think, a few decades later, that they grew up on a farm in Minnesota. The problems begin when people try to recover their feelings towards various childhood events - even events related to relationships within a family, which usually have a great emotional resonance.

As teenagers, only 14% of boys said they were their mothers' favorite children; As middle-aged men, 30% remembered being the most loved. When asked at the age of 14 what was the worst thing in their life at home, 40% mentioned the difficult living conditions. But looking back as adults, only 15% recalled feeling physically uncomfortable at home, and 50% complained that living at home was emotionally uncomfortable.

Even a seemingly objective question - "Did your parents beat you as punishment?" - produced conflicting answers. As boys, 82% of the respondents said they received corporal punishment. But only 33% of the 48-year-olds remembered their parents hitting them. In contrast, 23% of the respondents claimed in their adulthood that they were "bookworms" as children, while at the age of 14 only 5% of the respondents said that they read a lot of books.

Many studies show that the process of memory is an active and constant process, where old memories continue to be built all the time. Beliefs, prejudices and later experiences affect memory. Many psychiatrists and psychologists are suspicious - in many cases justified - towards "recovered memories" of people who report sexual and physical abuse in their childhood. The new study is noteworthy because it was performed on subjects who do not suffer from mental illness. There were men in the group of respondents who suffered from mental problems, but they did not accumulate fewer, nor more, correct answers than the other respondents.

Following the findings, Ofer recommends doctors and therapists - not to mention biographers - to be more careful, to treat all memories as "existential reconstructions" and to take everything a subject says with a limited guarantee.

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