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Enduring effects of child sexual abuse on memory and attention
Abstract
This study explored whether there were enduring memory and attention deficits in a nonclinical group of undergraduate women who had experienced child sexual abuse (CSA). Thirty-five women who were severely (n=18) or moderately (n=17) sexually abused and eighteen control subjects volunteered for the study. Subjects were matched on race, age, and grade point average. Measures of implicit and explicit memory as well as two measures of attention were administered under both no-threat and threat conditions. The threat paradigm employed was the use of words judged by 7 independent clinicians as either "threatening" or "very threatening" to adult survivors of child sexual abuse. Measures of depression and dissociation were also administered. It was hypothesized that there would be no baseline memory and/or attention deficits in the CSA population but that the experience of either internally or externally generated CSA-related threat would have an intermittent negative effect on these cognitive functions effecting attentional and memory disruptions in ongoing tasks. It was further hypothesized that the severely abused subjects would experience more disruption in the threat condition than the moderately abused subjects. Depression and dissociation scores were analyzed to ascertain both their presence in the three groups and their relationship to performance on the memory and attention tests. Under the no-threat condition, the severely abused subjects showed significantly poorer implicit memory than the controls in a between-groups univariate analysis of variance. An analysis of covariance with depression and dissociation as covariates showed this deficit could be attributed to the severe group's significantly greater depression. Under the threat condition, between-groups ultivariate analyses of variance showed there were no significant findings of memory or attention deficits in the CSA subjects although within-group univariate analyses showed trends in the hypothesized direction for both implicit memory and attention. These findings suggest that while some women who were sexually abused as children have enduring implicit memory and attention deficits as sequelae, the experience of the abuse, itself, is not a sufficient predictor of these deficits.
Subject Area
School counseling|Developmental psychology
Recommended Citation
Barrows, Patricia A, "Enduring effects of child sexual abuse on memory and attention" (1994). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9420598.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9420598