Research & Teaching
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Abnormal |
| Overview | Interpersonality Priming in People With Dissociative Identity Disorder?
Overview:Shared Memories?Dissociative disorders are a class of psychological disorders in which people experience a disconnection in terms of memory, behaviour, affect, and/or sense of identity. People with dissociative identity disorder (DID, better known as multiple personality disorder or MPD) have an extreme form of dissociation, manifesting itself in multiple identities or "personalities," each with different memories, ways of behaving, feelings, and thoughts. Psychologists believe that DID may be caused by repeated, extreme psychological stress, often resulting from extreme forms of abuse. People with DID usually have some form of interpersonality amnesia -- that is, the different identities cannot access the thoughts and actions of the other identities. Sometimes the different identities are not even aware of the existence of the other identities. Usually there is a "host" identity who is aware of the other identities, but even the host does not have access to the memories of the other identities. Although people with DID do not have explicit memory for the different identities, do they share implicit memories? Explicit memories are specific memories, such as where you went last night or recall for a list of studies words. Implicit memories do not have any specific recollected content like explicit memories but contains information that can influence behaviour without entering conscious awareness. Implicit memory is often described as memory without any awareness of the memory. Because implicit memory does not contain any verbalizable content, it must be examined indirectly. Psychologists study implicit memory through priming. Suppose you are asked to rate a list of words such as snow, chemical, optimum, in terms of how well you can imagine them. Next, you are given a word stem or beginning, app-. How would you complete the word? It is very likely that the first word that you thought of was appendix, one of the list words, instead of the many other words that begin with app-, including the very common word, apple. The list word primed the word completion. Psychologists examples such as these to demonstrate implicit memory. Eich, Macaulay, Loewenstein, and Dihle studied people with DID, who did not share explicit memories between identities; they had interpersonality amnesia. Eich et al. were interested in whether this interpersonality amnesia involved both explicit and implicit memory. |