Hi,
This entire article is a great research study conducted by Harvard University, but the following excerpt appeared particularly germane given your question:
“The recovered memory subjects—those who developed autobiographical memories of alien abduction—were most prone to exhibit false recall and recognition in our experiments. These individuals may rely disproportionately on the general sense or gist of the items they studied. Do these findings bear directly on false memories of traumatic events? To the extent that some false memories reflect the gist of past experience, illusory memories of alien abduction may be accurate representations of some aspect of a person’s past (e.g., sleep paralysis). Memories can be accurate in the sense that they refer abstractly to an experience, yet can contain many details that arise from source monitoring errors rather than from that particular experience (Schacter et al., 1998). That the recovered memory group was most prone to exhibit source monitoring deficits in this study may explain why, after perhaps undergoing suggestive psychotherapies, reading books, or watching movies about alien abduction, this group eventually “recalled” false memories, whereas the repressed memory group did not.”
Link to full PDF:
http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/schacterlab/files/clancey_et_al._2002.pdf
