Harald Merckelbach

..quot;Blindness" for the intentional aspect of symptom endorsement may explain the intrinsic overlap between feigning and somatoform complaints...

..A substantial proportion of psychiatric research is based on surveys that rely on self-report scales. Little is known about careless respondents in such surveys...

..If doctors exercise only their clinical judgement, however, every now and then they will fail to identify a malingerer...

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..Significantly more errors were made for those removed items that children failed to report than for those they had not removed. This indicates that children's suggestion-based omission errors are not due to erasure of memories...

..The present findings illustrate how various types of dissociation (i.e., depersonalization/derealization, absorption) are differentially related to cortisol stress responses...

..e., increase false alarms). The present findings indicate that schizotypal traits undermine source monitoring for action in a healthy population...

..Our findings contribute to the growing body of evidence indicating that subjective feelings of acute dissociation have their objective concomitants, notably fast habituation of physiologic responses...

..Contrary to our expectation, subjective memory problems did not correlate with suggestibility or false recollections. Furthermore, participants were accurate in estimating their objective memory performance...

..It primarily taps executive subfunctions (i.e., inhibition, updating, and monitoring), which are affected by psychopathological or neurological deficits...

..Correlational analyses revealed that fantasy proneness, but not self-reported traumatic experiences and dissociative symptoms were related to false recall and false recognition...

..Additional analyses revealed that participants characterized by a repressive coping style did not display a superior retrieval inhibition mechanism for negative material...

..All in all, this study lends further support to the notion that the memory effects of exposure to acute stress depend on the valence of the memory material...

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..negative) on the previous occasion. This underestimation was more pronounced for recovered-memory participants than for continuous-memory and control participants...

..The current study examined to what extent schizophrenic patients' lack of memory efficiency, their memory errors, and their source misattributions are related to neurocognitive deficits (i.e., executive dysfunctions)...

..These studies show that there is a link between dissociation and spontaneous commission errors in memory reports of emotional events, but the functional locus of this link remains unclear...

..Implications for neurobiological models intended to explain the delayed recall of CSA are discussed...

..These results indicate that discontinuous CSA memories spontaneously retrieved outside of therapy may be accurate, while implicating expectations arising from suggestions during therapy in producing false CSA memories...

..The present study succeeded in explaining a considerate part of the shared variance between dissociation and schizotypy...

..Thus, we argue that this research domain would profit from studies looking explicitly at whether experimental manipulations intended to implant false memories have overt behavioral consequences...

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..Also, we found that the DES-T was not exclusively related to reports of childhood sexual abuse...

..We propose that suppression in the alpha band and raised levels of theta activity, which are typical for high dissociators, might help to explain why dissociative symptoms are accompanied by attentional and memory deficits...

..Our findings indicate that underperformance and over-reporting are loosely coupled dimensions and that particularly over-reporting is intimately linked to heightened SCL-90 scores...

..The findings suggest that coaching undermines the diagnostic accuracy of the ASTM, but does not seem to influence the accuracy of the SIMS...

..Thus, reduced autobiographical memory specificity was not particularly pronounced in people with recovered memories of CSA. Poor autobiographical memory specificity is unlikely to explain the impression of amnesia reported by this group...

..The severity of PTSD symptoms was not significantly correlated with dissociative experiences. Our findings do not support the existence of special memory mechanisms that are unique to experiencing traumatic events...

..The authors conclude with a discussion of research domains (e.g., sleep-related experiences, drug-related dissociation) that promise to advance our understanding of cognition and dissociation...

..Thus, our results demonstrate that repressive coping might be adaptive in the short run, but counterproductive in the long run...

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..Our findings may partly explain why people with spontaneous CSA memories have the subjective impression that they have "repressed" their CSA memories for many years...

..Our 2 studies provide no evidence for the betrayal trauma theory, nor do they support other theories assuming that dissociation is the manifestation of an automatic defense mechanism...

..The results indicate that people with recovered memories do not score higher on the SIMS and the MENT than other CSA survivors suggesting that symptom overreporting is not typical for people reporting recovered memories...

..The case demonstrates that Ganser-like symptoms deserve close scrutiny, preferably with malinger tests...

..This suggests that individual differences in executive function do occur in a healthy population and that the reconstructive activity inherent in memory depends in part on executive functioning...

..Accordingly, sleep hygiene may contribute to the treatment or prevention of dissociative symptoms...

..Results show that, although the accuracy of both instruments appears to be somewhat reduced by a mix of symptom coaching and test coaching, the TOMM and SIMS are relatively resistant to different kinds of coaching...

..Our findings show that people's expectancies about their memory may affect their memory performance. These results may have implications for both clinical practice and the legal domain...

..The data also extend previous studies in demonstrating that extensive retrieval can increase the number of commission errors...

..Failures in internal source monitoring are a prominent feature of schizophrenia, and our results suggest that they form a more enduring characteristic of this disorder than has previously been assumed...

..Suggestions for future research, circumventing methodological flaws, are given...

..e., emotional reasoning). Potential avenues for future studies on anxiety-related threat-perception distortions are briefly discussed...

..Although women with a history of abuse reported higher levels of psychological distress than controls, the two groups did not differ in their verbal learning performance...

..That is, lower memory and intelligence were associated with higher suggestibility. No significant correlations were found between suggestibility and other personality characteristics...

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..In line with previous research, we found that accounts of emotional events can be highly accurate but tend to be incomplete. More importantly, inconsistencies cannot be seen as valid predictors of testimonial inaccuracy...

..Our findings suggest that a failure to inhibit previous responses might contribute to the pathological memory manifestations of dissociation...

..Autobiographical memory dysfunction in depression appears to be stable over time, is related to short-term prognosis in depression, and may act as a vulnerability factor that influences the long-term course of depressive disorders...

..Both experiments showed that survival processing leads to a greater recall advantage over the stereotype groups and control group. These data indicate that the mere activation of stereotypes cannot explain the survival recall advantage...

..These results therefore suggest that stress does not serve as a proximate mechanism of the survival processing advantage in memory...

..Results showed that the negative event elicited more false memories than the neutral event. The presentation of a true photograph did not promote the development of false memories...

..Moreover, at the first interview, additional suggestive details inhibited the development of children's images into false memories...

..Restrictive factors that play a role in this context have to do with forgetting, attribution, and malingering...

..The authors conclude that it makes little sense to speculate about memory effects and elevated levels of cortisol because such effects might depend on the valence of the material that is learned...

..Both their neutral and emotional drawings revealed boundary extension. Apparently, the schema construction that underlies boundary extension is a robust and ubiquitous process...

..These findings provide further evidence for a robust relationship between disruptions in sleep patterns and dissociative symptoms...

..e., incorrect responses other than the critical lure). Number of hits and critical lures did not differ between the groups...

..e., generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and panic disorder) and fantasy proneness. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are briefly discussed...

..90). All in all, our findings provide a basis for cautious optimism regarding the usefulness of the SIMS as a screening tool for malingering...

..e., peritraumatic dissociation). These findings are in sharp contrast to the defensive function ascribed to both types of dissociation and also the commonly held assumption that peritraumatic and trait dissociation are intimately linked...

..Furthermore, fear of the beast appeared to generalize, that is, children who became more fearful of the beast after receiving negative information, also became more apprehensive of other dogs and predators...

..To examine the relationship between thought-action fusion (TAF) and schizotypy...

..We examined whether misleading information (i.e. misinformation) may promote symptom reporting in non-clinical participants...

..If such a prime was absent, self-control performance of depleted participants decreased indicating ego depletion. Using a different manipulation, these findings were replicated in Study 2...

..As a matter of fact, results of these studies are open to multiple interpretations and in no way refute an interpretation of alters in terms of metaphors for different emotional states...

..Moreover, children high on behavioural inhibition more frequently reported anxiety disorders symptoms in the subclinical range. These findings fit well with those of previous studies on behavioural inhibition...

..Taken together, our results suggest that boundary extension for neutral and emotional photographs is a more robust phenomenon than its counterpart, tunnel memory...

..This study suggests that stress may have differential effects on memory, depending on whether the memory test is regulated by the prefrontal cortex or the medial temporal lobe...

..Symptoms of OCD and generalised anxiety remained significantly related to TAF. Altogether, the data are supportive of the notion that TAF is involved in a broad range of anxiety disorders and in particular OCD...

..All in all, our data show that the German version of the GBAI is a valuable tool for measuring attributional styles of offenders...

..Thus, the possibility that dissociation encourages self-reported traumatic experiences rather than vice versa merits investigation. While attractive, simple models in which trauma directly causes dissociation are unlikely to be true...

..Altogether these findings are in agreement with those of previous research in adult and child populations, and further support the notion that anxiety sensitivity should be viewed as an unique factor of anxiety vulnerability...

..Moreover, trauma group children more frequently fulfilled DSM-IV criteria for PTSD than did control children. The results of this study support the validity of the Traumatic Stress Disorder scale of the SCARED...

..If they do enter the judicial domain, these conclusions may lead to dubious forensic decisions...

..Results indicate that SCARED scores are positively and in a theoretically meaningful way related to RCMAS and FSSC-R scores, and thus provide evidence for the concurrent validity of the SCARED...

..However, temporal consistency was somewhat disappointing. Also, the question remains whether TAF is specific to obsessive-compulsive disorder or taps more pervasive biases that play a role in a variety of disorders...