Psyco 105 Individual and Social Behaviour Help Psych home
Sec. B4, T 3:30 E-mail

 

Reading Reports of Empirical Studies

The purpose of the Introduction is to describe the problem, develop the theoretical and empirical background for the research questions, and elaborate a rationale for all parts of the study. In order to understand why the research was conducted, you need to ask yourself the following questions: 
  • What are the research questions? 
  • Where did these research questions come from? 
  • Is the research important? Why or why not? 
These questions set up the context and rationale for the study. Read the Introduction section of the published article and see if you can answer these questions. Then work through the summary of the introduction below. Help in addressing the questions can be found in the left column. 


 
 
 
 

What are the research questions?self-test
 
 

Where did these research questions come from?self-test
 
 

Is this research important? self-test
Memory, Amnesia, and Dissociative Identity Disorder 
 

Eric Eich, Dawn Macaulay, Richard J. Loewenstein, 
and Patrice H. Dihle



Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a very controversial mental disorder.  It is difficult to understand how a single person could embody so many different mental states or personalities.  Even more controversial is that the different personalities have very little knowledge of the existence of the other personalities.  This impaired memory of one personality for another is called interpersonality amnesia.  A number of psychologists who are skeptical of diagnoses of DID argue that memories are consciously suppressed and that it is possible to empirically demonstrate shared memories.  Other psychologists who believe that DID is a true psychopathology argue that studying interpersonality priming can tell us a lot about how memory is organized in normally functioning people as well as people with DID. 

Very little research has been conducted investigating memory in people with DID.  In all studies, however, demonstration of interpersonality amnesia depends on the type of memory task that was administered.  Interpersonality amnesia is almost always found with explicit memory tasks but only sometimes found with implicit memory tasks. 

Explicit memory tasks include remembering a list of words or pictures that had been encountered before.  Implicit memory tasks are a bit more complex because the person can not be led to use explicit memory in completing the tasks.  A common implicit memory task is to expose a person to a list of words (e.g., appendix, banana) in some other task (e.g., in an explicit memory task).  Later, the beginnings of these words (e.g., app-, ban-), or word stems, are presented and the person is asked to complete the stem with the first word that comes to mind.  Implicit memory is inferred to have been used if the person completes app- with appendix rather than the more common word, apple. 

Eich et al. argued that some implicit memory tasks tap general knowledge and some tap very specific individual experiences.  Differences in implicit memory tasks might be why interpersonality amnesia is found with some task but the opposite, interpersonality priming, is found with other tasks.  Eich et al. designed one implicit task, the word stem completion task, to tap into implicit memory related to idiosyncratic prior experiences; they designed another implicit memory task, the picture fragment task, to tap more general implicit memory. 
 
 
 

[Please remember to complete the evaluation survey for this Reading the Research. The evaluation  link is on the References page at the end of this module. Thanks!]
read.gif (919 bytes)   Reading the Research Questions to Consider
  Title Abstract Introduction Method Results Discussion References