Elke Geraerts
Biographical Sketch
Elke Geraerts is an assistant professor of clinical psychology at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. She obtained her PhD degree at Maastricht University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.
She studies how people remember and forget traumatic events such as childhood sexual abuse. In the past years, her main focus has been on the cognitive functioning of people reporting recovered memories of abuse. Other lines of work include the study of posttraumatic stress disorder, repressive coping, and false memories. Her work has appeared in over thirty peer-reviewed journal articles and she has been an expert eyewitness on cases of childhood abuse.
Abstract: Cognitive mechanisms underlying recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse
People sometimes report recovering long-forgotten memories of childhood sexual abuse. The memory mechanisms that lead to such reports are not well understood, and the authenticity of recovered memories has often been challenged. In several studies we have now identified two subgroups of people reporting recovered memories of childhood abuse that differ dramatically in their cognitive profiles. The patterns of memory function that will be discussed in this talk indicate differing mechanistic origins of recovered memories.