Traumatic Memories Are Not Necessarily Accurate Memories

Here is a link to a research paper by Laney and Loftus.  It provides perspective on the Kavanaugh accusers.

Those who "believe" accusers are misinformed.  There is a great amount of uncertainty concerning such memories.

Here are some excerpts.
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ABSTRACT

Some therapists, as well as other commentators, have suggested that memories of horrific
trauma are buried in the subconscious by some special process, such as repression, and are
later reliably recovered. We find that the evidence provided to support this claim is flawed.
Where, then, might these memory reports come from? We discuss several research
paradigms that have shown that various manipulations can be used to implant false
memories—including false memories for traumatic events. These false memories can be
quite compelling for those who develop them and can include details that make them seem
credible to others. The fact that a memory report describes a traumatic event does not
ensure that the memory is authentic.

EXCERPTS

In one study, researchers interviewed 106 US undergraduate
subjects the morning after the 1986 explosion of the Challenger space shuttle to determine where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news (30). They then interviewed the 44 subjects that they could locate in the fall of 1988, nearly 3 years after the event. Although subjects were in
general extremely confident about the accuracy of their memories of hearing about the disaster and readily produced detailed memories of these events, their memories were in fact riddled with errors. These errors were not limited to the details of where they were and whom they were with, but included even the broadest possible facts. The errors suggested that, over several years, memories tend to deteriorate, although confidence in the memories may remain strong.

In other studies, experimenters have used leading questions to intentionally distort traumatic memories. Crombag and colleagues interviewed Dutch subjects some 10 months after a horrible plane crash that had killed 43 people and had been major national news (31). One of the interview questions was misleading: “Did you see the television film of the moment the plane hit the apartment building?” There was in fact no such film (the plane hit an apartment building and camera crews did
not arrive until much later). Nonetheless, more than 60% of subjects claimed to have seen the film and then went on to answer additional questions about the nonexistent video footage.

In another study, researchers had Russian subjects complete a questionnaire in the spring of 2002 about 2 separate terrorist attacks (the first involved 2 Moscow apartment buildings in
1999, and the second was the 2001 World Trade Center catastrophe) (32). About 6 months later, they interviewed subjects about 1 of the 2 terrorist events and included a misleading question: “A half-year ago, when you were taking part in our study, you mentioned a wounded animal. Do you remember it?” (this was not actually the case for any of the subjects in the study). Although all the subjects responding to the World Trade Center questionnaire denied that they had seen a wounded animal, 5 subjects (12.5%) interviewed about the Moscow bombings accepted the false suggestion and provided sensory details about various injured animals.

Taken together, these studies show that vivid memories—even memories for traumatic events and memories that people are confident about—can still become distorted over time or at the suggestion of others. As such, the fact that a memory describes a traumatic event does not make that memory reliable. Later, we will expand on this point by showing that people can develop memories for traumas that never occurred at all.