DEBRIEFING MEANS never having to say you’re sorry?

Debriefing – Following the research, especially where any deception or withholding of information had taken place, the committee wishes to emphasise the importance of appropriate debriefing. In some circumstances, the verbal description of the nature of the investigation would not be sufficient to eliminate all possibility of harmful after-effects. For example, an experiment in which negative mood was induced requires the induction of a happy mood state before the participant leaves the experimental setting.

BPS Guidelines, 23-7-2009.

Love means never having to say you’re sorry.
Ali McGraw to Ryan O’Neal in the movie Love Story 1970.

As a newbie in the teaching world of psychology (three years) but not a newbie in life (just coming up to 50) I have been interested in the nature some issues are dealt with by some much more experienced teachers and lecturers than I. Recently, at an excellent OCR conference, I heard a Professor discussing memory and mentioning her use of implanting false memories in her psychological research, its usefulness to her and its wider acceptance in the field. She said it was all ethical and fine in her research as everyone had been debriefed so that was OK, but is it OK? As background she mentioned `the mousetrap experiment` as an example of how introduced memory in children can surface later in life and be confused with actual memory. I had never heard of this experiment so did a bit of digging around in the arena of false memory.

My issue, in the area of memory and debrief, is that I say to students that debrief is used to respect the participants ‘wish to’ understand what has happened, but I often forget to add that this does not mean the participants should accept our explanation especially if they, for the good of science, have been deceived. If I can deceive them in small things, how do they know that I am not deceiving them in larger things, does offering a debrief circumvent our saying sorry when we have deliberately changed a person’s view of events, who are we to say what is harmless and what is not?

Understanding of the BPS ethical guidelines is drummed into our A level students from day one and we try to get them to see the importance of being open and honest and professional with each other and with themselves about the nature of their work, research interests, and how what they know can affect who they know. Brandishing newly acquired social skills through a study of psychology still makes those with only a cursory knowledge of the subject a little nervous, and I always advise care when students start to discuss what they have learnt with family and peers. No we can’t read minds, but we can have a jolly good go at it when no-one is looking!

Knowing something gives us an advantage, from how to change a tyre to how to read reactions, with knowledge comes understanding and hopefully responsibility. I have now expanded the teaching of ethics in the new spec (OCR 2009/10) to include all nine ethical aspects rather that the five I used to use in the first two years of my career. (Informed consent – Deception – Debriefing – Right to withdraw – Protection of participants, now adding Confidentiality – Observational research- Giving advice – Colleagues.) I had always inferred the extra four (adding Confidentiality – Observational research – Giving advice – Colleagues) but from this year enshrined them from week one in AS methodology classes with the eager Year 12s.

But back to my original idea – the BPS argument quoted above reinforces the idea that a participant should leave an experiment in the same emotional state that they enter it, but specifically emphasise the negative. In August I had the good fortune to visit Boston Massachusetts, taking a day trip to Harvard University. The square outside the walls of the grand college was crowded with tourists, hawkers and students offering free tours whilst standing next to a large placard which informed the curious that ‘students live on tips so please be generous’. I hurried through the crowd but heard two students shout ‘be part of a psychology experiment’. It had a ‘roll up…, roll up!’ kind of carnival feel about it so I volunteered. I had to imagine a happy incident in my life then turn the page over and answer questions. I did so using a rating scale, which they insisted was a Likert scale but was not (not so clever there then) and then I gave back the form. They thanked me and carried on touting for business. I asked for a de-brief and they were very apologetic about not having offered it, scolding themselves that in future they would. I felt very smug that I had caught them out in a little methodological gaff, apparently 27,000 people apply to Harvard every year and only 7% get accepted, my kids are cleverer than I thought because they know to debrief at 17. So the experiment used my subjective memory of a happy incident then tried to find out if my positive frame of mind would alter the ratings I gave. I wasn’t harmed obviously, but if the experiment was designed to change my mood then according to BPS the debrief should be applicable regardless of the positive nature of the outcome. I know guidelines are as diverse as the countries which try to enforce them and that memory is subjective so I made a mental note to think about both on my return to the UK.

The nature of memory, like my happy memory in Harvard Yard, is debated endlessly in psychology textbooks and papers. Elizabeth Loftus is a big name in OCR study and in her book ‘The Myth of Repressed Memory’ she continues her quest to help the world understand how vulnerable and open to change our precious memories are and her belief that repressed memory is an illusion, thus saying goodbye forever to daddy Freud, and throwing doubt on acres of court testimony in sexual abuse cases, a subject in which Loftus often appears as an expert witness. The consequences of her belief make her as unpopular with some groups as she is popular with others, leaving not much room for fence sitting. If you believe in repressed memory and the ability for therapy to uncover secrets then she is a demon, if you feel that memory archaeology is a playground for those who wish to influence and implant memories then she is an angel with an unpalatable message. I believe she sees the therapeutic process in recovering memories as a form of informative debrief where memories are induced in an effort to give the patient some kind of understanding as to the process they have been involved in but previously were deceived by, but in this process the memories can be manipulated and moulded. Loftus may see this as well meaning but dangerous and of no benefit to the patient regardless of how important the therapist says the recovering of repressed abuse is to the patient’s recovery and health.

Nigel Hunt in his article ‘Debriefing children and Young People’ (lost the reference but its page 59 when I find it) writes about the use of PD (psychological debriefing) when it comes to helping children and young people deal with traumatic events in their life to prevent the onset of PTSD. Offering help and talking things through is examined from a clinical perspective and concludes that much of the evidence of success is anecdotal but surrounding evidence about children and trauma generally more abundant. This surrounding evidence is often more peer assessed giving greater credibility to the psychological interventionist approach when it comes to helping children deal with trauma.

He discusses the fine line between revealing too much to a child during an intervention which could harm their own internal acceptance and healing process and withholding to protect which could lead to later trust issues when the child realizes they were further deceived, even for all the right reasons. Revealing truth has its own ethical dilemmas, but then if all that is left is memory of the events with no corroborating forensic evidence then whose truth is the most truthful?

I expect that debriefing is seen as a powerful tool in somehow healing up the mistrust between any participant and experimenter, saying that something was in fact a little white lie or a ruse is a way of saying sorry and being up front, hopefully this is supposed to heal the rift of mistrust however minor the deception was.

Elizabeth Loftus too used false memories in her own research ‘Loftus and colleagues’ (Loftus 1993, Loftus and Ketcham 1994, Loftus and Pickrell 1995) demonstrated that people can be led to integrate into their personal histories an entirely fabricated event.  Over the course of several interviews that involved using a subject’s family member as a confederate, subjects were led to believe that they had been lost in a shopping mall when they were young children.’ (Lynn p138)

Is this acceptable psychological experimental method to test the reliability of memory as practised by such luminaries as Elizabeth Loftus when she in turn rails against the claims of repressed memory therapists who in their memory recovery work claim validity to abuse memories, long buried, from clients whose perpetrators profess innocence? Both seem to have similar aims, to prove that memory is vitally important in the human experience but for different ends, one that it is fallible, the other that it is a storehouse of the too terrible to live with. Both sides claim they are right, perhaps someone could debrief me and tell me which side to believe more.

Research into adults who had had false memories implanted as children was carried out by Huffman, Crossman and Cessi in 1996, corroborated some years later, stated that out of 22 children who had been part of an experiment about an angry child called Sam Stone (Leichtman & Ceci 1995) that anything from 13-33% of the participants remembered the fabrications as truth. So when implanting memories in children, or adults for that matter, even if we give an in-depth debrief, we still leave a shadow on the memory in the participant. The Mousetrap study which I mentioned earlier (Ceci, Huffman, Smith and Loftus 1994) introduced a story of a child getting his/her fingers caught in a mousetrap, which never happened. I could not find much data about this so some of you may have more. Some children remembered it as real when questioned and the same children were later interviewed in a follow-up study several weeks later (20/20 interview with John Stossel 1994). A child still ascertained the mousetrap and, by inference, the pain was real. These studies are often quoted when the credibility of child witnesses is challenged, can children be relied upon, and for that matter can an adult of be relied upon? Lauren Slater in her excellent book ‘Inside Skinners Box’ challenges Loftus’s idea of all memory being completely fallible saying that it seems to turn us all into subjective witnesses to events which have no common heritage, each of us sees everything as a personal experience and none of it could be true. She thinks that is depressing, which I suppose it is. Slater also writes with feeling about the participants in the original Milgram experiment kids all know and love and traced some of them. Even though they were all debriefed, the events had a traumatic effect on many of their lives changing forever their view of themselves and their capacity to be compliant in the face of authority; debrief was given but no-one said sorry. Loftus comes through continuing to state the claim that courts which decide life or death for murderers still rely on eye-witness testimony and faulty memory to make their decisions, so her quest continues.

Finally an article in the ‘The Guardian’ of 2003 called ‘We can implant entirely false memories’ begins with a story where Elizabeth Loftus convinces Alan Alda (actor Hawkeye of MASH fame) that he dislikes hard boiled eggs because he made himself vomit on them as a child. The article talks of suggestibility and how plausibility improves the chances of accepting a story is true, such as kids and bullying, being lost in a shopping centre, both socially regular occurrences in western society. If it happened to someone you know then it could have happened to you too. The Welcome Institute proved that emotionally charged words such as ‘murder’ and ‘scream’ were more easily remembered than more neutral words in their testing of a memory assisting beta blocker drug called Propranolol. So I return to my original issue, debriefing.  Telling a child they were hurt by a mouse trap seems innocuous, it is not a life-threatening event but if you are three years old it’s quite a biggie. If this is acceptable then great care is needed. The professor I met at the OCR conference changed the process to include a false memory of a pleasant event, which was also successful, so perhaps time has mellowed the American research programme, but still, for me, it feels a little uncomfortable to do this with children. These memory altered children grow up and then you could let your conspiracy theory Hollywood movie mind go wild and wonder if our deliberate interference might have a butterfly effect creating super hero type monsters…and then…and then…but perhaps I am being too dramatic.

Mark Judge Head of Psychology Dept, the Leventhorpe School, Sawbridgeworth

m.judge@leventhorpe.herts.sch.uk

References

Truth in Memory 2004 Lynn.s McConckey.
K Blackwell London 2004

The Myth of Repressed Memory
Dr Elizabeth Loftus & Katherine Ketcham 1994
St Martins Press New York USA

Expert witness directory
Publisher – Erlbaum associates

The Guardian Online
Guardian.co.uk
We can implant entirely false memories 4th Dec 2003 downloaded 23/7/9

Skinners Box
by Lauren Slater