Maughan B, Rutter M
MRC Child Psychiatry Unit, Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK.
J Pers Disord. 1997 Spring;11(1):19-33. doi: 10.1521/pedi.1997.11.1.19.
Much evidence for associations between adverse experiences in childhood and personality disorder in adult life comes from retrospective accounts. This raises important questions over the reliability and validity of long-term recall. The strengths and limitations of different methods for assessing the accuracy and stability of retrospective reports are discussed. Evidence from cognitive psychology on memory and memory processes, and on the phenomenon of infantile amnesia, provides important background for assessing issues more specific to recall in studies of risk for psychopathology. Here, topics of particular concern include: memory for traumatic early experience; the effects of mood state and symptomatology on recall; recovered or false memories; and the implications of mental representations of early experience for understanding psychopathology. Current evidence suggests that while adequately reliable accounts of many early experiences can be gained using appropriate techniques, further methodological studies are needed, and investigations using retrospective methods would be wise to include corroborative evidence whenever feasible.
许多关于童年不良经历与成年后人格障碍之间关联的证据都来自回顾性叙述。这引发了关于长期回忆的可靠性和有效性的重要问题。本文讨论了评估回顾性报告准确性和稳定性的不同方法的优缺点。认知心理学中关于记忆和记忆过程以及婴儿期遗忘现象的证据，为评估精神病理学风险研究中更具体的回忆问题提供了重要背景。在此，特别关注的主题包括：对创伤性早期经历的记忆；情绪状态和症状对回忆的影响；恢复的或虚假的记忆；以及早期经历的心理表征对理解精神病理学的意义。目前的证据表明，虽然使用适当技术可以获得许多早期经历的足够可靠的叙述，但仍需要进一步的方法学研究，并且使用回顾性方法的调查在可行时明智地纳入确证性证据。
