During the process of psychotherapy, elaine recovered some long-forgotten and painful memories from her
childhood. this experience led her to conclude that these memories must have been repressed for many
years. discuss the issues involved in determining the validity of elaine's claim; that is, discuss the factors that
lead to biased or false memories that would need to be ruled out before her "recovered" memories can be
accepted.

Traumatic memories of events occurring over childhood are hardly remembered for many factors. First of all, because they tend to be processed as implicit memories, that deal with unconscious information. The amygdala is the brain structure that process this type of information, and its development occur earlier than the hippocampus, which is the region responsible for explicit memories. Thus memories of events that occurred in early childhood are usually restricted to the unconscious.

In addition, details of traumatic events are often suppressed in our explicit memory due to a type of psychic defense mechanism that seeks to avoid remembering these painful memories frequently.

Thus, details of repressed memories in childhood are often very inaccurate when recalled in adulthood, and thus they become extremely susceptible to false memories. False memories are memories of events or details that a person often believes he or she possesses, but are actually only a result of the mind's effort to fill in details and inaccuracies about an implicit memory through imagination. These false memories can even be induced by suggestion.

During this process of recovering traumatic childhood memories, a person must seek as much certainty as possible about this information, preferably comparing their own memories with those of others who were part of their life over the period that is being remembered.

a lot ig i am not sure