False recognition in women with a history of childhood emotional neglect and diagnose of recurrent major depression Rodrigo Grassi-Oliveira ⇑ , Carlos Falcão de Azevedo Gomes, Lilian Milnitsky Stein Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, Postgraduate Program in Psychology - Human Cognition, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Brazil article info Article history: Received 25 August 2010 Available online 27 March 2011 Keywords: Memory Child maltreatment Neglect False memory abstract While previous research has suggested that adults with a history of childhood sexual abuse may be more prone to produce false memories, little is known about the consequences of childhood neglect on basic memory processes. For this reason, the authors investigated how a group of women with a history of childhood emotional neglect (CEN) and diagnosed with recurrent Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) performed on the Deese–Roediger– McDermott paradigm in comparison to control groups. The results indicated that women with MDD and CEN were actually less prone to produce false memories relative to both women with MDD but no CEN and healthy women without MDD and any form of child- hood maltreatment. These findings were explained in terms of the inability to extract/ retrieve gist memories that support false recognition of critical lures, an explanation that seems to fit well with emerging MRI findings linking childhood neglect to reduced volume of brain regions associated to memory function. Ó 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The relation between childhood maltreatment and memory has been a topic of ongoing investigation (for a review, see Howe, Cicchetti, & Toth, 2006; Howe, Goodman, & Cicchetti, 2008) partially driven by research on the memory accuracy of adults who reported being victims of sexual abuse during childhood. More specifically, it has been argued that adults with a history of childhood sexual abuse may be more prone to produce false memories (i.e., remembering events from the past that actually never happened) than adults without such a history. To test this hypothesis, researchers have often relied on the use of a paradigm called Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM; Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995), which involves pre- senting word lists (e.g., hot, snow, warm, winter, and ice) that are semantically associated to an unpresented critical lure (e.g., cold). On a subsequent recognition test, subjects are presented to studied words and critical lures, being often the false recognition of critical lures. In line with that, Bremner, Shobe, and Kihlstrom (2000) presented semantically associated word lists to four groups of subjects: women with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) related to childhood sexual abuse, women without abuse-related PTSD, and men and women without PTSD or a history of sexual abuse. They observed that women with abuse-related PTSD had higher rates of false recognition than both abused women without PTSD and non- abused women without PTSD. Similarly, Clancy, Schacter, McNally, and Pitman (2000) found that women who had reported recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse were more prone to false recognition of critical lures than women who had not reported it. Therefore, researchers concluded that reported history of childhood sexual abuse in adults might lead to higher levels of false memories, casting doubt on the memory accuracy of this population. 1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2011.03.005 ⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, Pós-Graduação em Psicologia, Av. Ipiranga, no. 6681, prédio 11, sala 936, CEP 90619-900, Porto Alegre/RS, Brazil. Fax: +55 51 33203633. E-mail address: rodrigo.grassi@pucrs.br (R. Grassi-Oliveira). Consciousness and Cognition 20 (2011) 1127–1134 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Consciousness and Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog