Retrospective Reporting of Childhood Adversity: Issues in Assessing Long-Term Recall

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.