Nature and nurture and the reliabilities and limitations of memory were the subjects of the symposia developed by APsaA's two liaisons to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Regina Pally and Philip S. Holzman, as part of the scientific program of the AAAS's annual meeting held in Denver this past February. Pally is liaison to the Neuroscience Section of the AAAS, and Holzman has served as liaison to the AAAS's Psychology Section. He is currently director of the Psychology Research Laboratory at the Mailman Research Center, McLean Hospital, Harvard University.
The AAAS symposia provide an exciting opportunity to see psychoanalysts in dialogue with researchers and academics outside their immediate field. The AAAS annual meeting attracts a diverse audience from all scientific disciplines and from the industrial, academic, nonprofit, and policy communities. More than 300 journalists cover the meeting. Since 1948, APsaA has been an affiliate of the AAAS (“Triple A-S”), the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the renowned magazine Science.
“The presence of psychoanalysts and the psychoanalytic perspective at a meeting of the AAAS lends credibility to the entire field. Our participation is a major step in the direction of avoiding the current trend within science to marginalize psychoanalysis,” remarked APsaA member Glen Gabbard, who was a presenter at Regina Pally's symposium, “How ‘Nature and Nurture’ Impact Child Development.”
This symposium presented research showing that genes and environment interact in a synergistic way to influence how a child develops psychologically and biologically Two of the presenters, A. Champagne of McGill University and Stephen Suomi of NIH, focused on animal and human studies that indicate genetic factors predispose offspring to develop such “psychological” traits as shyness, tearfulness, aggressiveness, and impulsiveness. The presenters illustrated how specific neurobiologic substrates (e.g. receptors and mRNA levels) correlate with these traits.
Pally's goal in developing this symposium was to present a more balanced approach to the “nature-nurture” controversy. How a child is raised may ameliorate genetic vulnerabilities or exacerbate them. Psychotherapy may also help ameliorate genetically derived psychological vulnerabilities.
The presentations moved from nurturing in rats (Champagne, doctoral fellow at McGill's Douglas Hospital Research Center: “Good vs. Bad Maternal Care: How Mothering Can Influence Gene Expression”) to rhesus monkeys (Suomi, chief, Laboratory of Comparative Ethology, National Institute of Child Health Development: “How Gene-Environment Interactions Shape Social and Emotional Functioning in Rhesus Monkeys”) and then on to human babies (D. Jeffrey Newport, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, Emory University School of Medicine: “Maternal Depression: A Child's First Adverse Life Event”) and concluded with the adult human (Glen Gabbard, professor of psychiatry, Baylor College of Medicine, Training and Supervising Analyst, Houston/Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute: “The Impact of Psychotherapy on the Brain”).
Holzman, along with Stephanie Bird, special assistant to the vice president for research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, organized a symposium focused on aspects of memory, “Remembering Traumatic Experiences in Childhood: Reliability and Limitations of Memory.” Recent research findings in neuroscience and psychology provide experimental evidence that memory is more fluid and malleable than was once thought and offer explanations for how memories, emotions, and motivation play roles in everyday encounters.
Using behavioral, imaging, and psychophysical methods, researchers have shown that adults can be influenced to remember events falsely and are susceptible to memory illusions, thus calling into question the reliability of eyewitness testimony.
Dottie Jeffries is public affairs director for the American Psychoanalytic Association and can be reached at djeffries@apsa.org. She thanks the Denver Psychoanalytic Society's administrator, Linda Borden, for contacting members of the society about the AAAS meeting.
The use of young children as witnesses within the court system is especially problematic not only because, like adults, their memories are vulnerable to emotional influences, but also because the anatomical substrates of memory are still developing, their powers of visualization and imagination are robust, and their sense of logic and causality are still immature.
The memory symposium discussed recent findings from the cellular to the systems level and described the current state of memory research. The discussion covered a survey of the many natural errors of memory, brain imaging studies of recall processes, the developmental changes between early childhood (before the age of three) and adulthood that result in the capacity to encode long-term memories, the role of trauma and conflict in recall, and the extent to which individual human memory can be used as an objective measure of events. This symposium also considered the courtroom experiences of expert witnesses in trials that involve recall of events that occurred many years ago.
The presenters included Daniel Schacter, Michelle Leichtman, and Richard McNally, all of Harvard's Department of Psychology. Schacter, a former APsaA fellow, discussed “Neuroscience Research Findings Regarding Memory”. Leichtman's presentation was on “Memory in Children,” and McNally's on “Remembering Trauma.” Joel Weinberger of Adelphi University's Derner Institute, presented on “Conscious and Unconscious Elements in Remembering”, and Elizabeth Loftus of the University of New Hampshire's Department of Psychology on “Eyewitness Testimony of Childhood Trauma.” The symposium's discussants were Holzman and Melanie L. Leitner, an AAAS congressional scholar.
Working with and within the AAAS meeting led to valuable exposure for APsaA and for psychoanalysis. Stories on the analytically oriented symposia were reported in CNN Headline News and the Denver Post. APsaA established new press relationships at AAAS with reporters at the Los Angeles Times and Business Week, among others.
“It was very exciting to be a part of such a large collection of thoughtful and informed scientists,” commented Denver APsaA member Rhoda Singer, who attended both AAAS symposia.