Implicit Memory, Interpersonality Amnesia, and Dissociative Identity Disorder

Abstract

(from the chapter) This chapter examines interpersonality amnesia in persons with dissociative identity disorder (DID) when memory for past events is assessed using implicit measures of retention. Participants in the authors' (1997) study included 7 DID patients, each of whom was able to alternate, upon the experimenter's nonhypnotic request, between 2 secondary identities or personality states claiming to have no conscious awareness of the other's experiences. Both identities performed a picture fragment completion task. Having identified a given object on Trial 1, the alternate identity needed to see significantly less pictorial detail in order to do so again on Trial 2. To find out whether memory performance of DID patients can be reproduced by normal Ss attempting to mimic "multiplicity," and whether repetition priming in picture fragment completion can occur between as well as within simulated personality states, the test procedures were repeated with 9 simulator Ss. The simulators failed to exhibit evidence of interpersonality priming. The authors' conclude that although the present results are suggestive of a qualitative difference in the implicit memory performance of DID patients vs simulators, they should be interpreted with extreme caution. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2002 APA, all rights reserved) Record 63 of 84 in PsycINFO 1996-1997