Reality monitoring in adults reporting repressed, recovered, or continuous memories of childhood sexual abuse

People who report either repressed or recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) may have deficits in reality monitoring-the process whereby one discriminates memories of percepts from memories of images. Using signal detection methods, the authors found that adults reporting either repressed or recovered memories of CSA were less able to discriminate between words they had seen from words they had imagined seeing than were adults reporting either never having forgotten their CSA or adults reporting no history of CSA. Relative deficits in the ability to discriminate percepts from images (i.e., low d') were apparent on only some tests. The groups did not differ in their criterion-response bias-for affirming having seen versus imagined stimuli.