For this weeks blogpost I read a very interesting article about Multiple Personality Disorder. After a movie called Sybil, multiplied personality disorder started being diagnosed at a very increased rate. One symptom that was said to go along with multiple personality disorder was amnesia.

In past experiments, patients who suffer from multiple personality disorder would be flat out asked whether or not they suffered from amnesia between personalities. Most patients would answer yes, but scientists could never be sure whether or not that was the truth.

Richard Mcnally, a Harvard professor of psychology came up with a test that would reveal the true answer of whether or not amnesia was a symtom of multiple personality disorders. His experiment consists of a"concealed information task". Basically he designed a test a lot like the discrimination test we had all taken as a class at the beginning of the semester. With Mcnally's test would show different words on a screen and the test taker had to say whether or not the words were in the list of "target" words. Some of the words that were not in the target bank would be related to the personality the the test taker wasn't currently in. If that person paused at one of these words, which many of them did, this meant they did not suffer from amnesia.

After taking the discrimination test at the beginning of the semester, I am not sure how accurate these results are. For the most part, I don't really consider myself someone to discriminate. But I grew up next to a town where a lot of mexicans reside. After years of getting honked at and cat called in the street by mexican men driving by, I do unfortunately feel a little bit of discrimination towards mexicans that I am not proud of. When I took the this style test though, it claimed I have little to no discrimination. Because of these results, I question how accurate these tests really are.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/08/a-story-that-doesnt-hold-up/