Belief, 5

A child’s perceptual and cognitive evaluations of people’s moods and feelings are often different from those of an adult. Childhood memories and beliefs turn out to be particularly inaccurate and can be easily influenced—even falsified—by other people. Because they’ve been repeated and reinforced over many years, however, those memories are often the least likely to be modified or rejected as a result of later experiences and beliefs. The power of emotion can turn fantasy into a supposed fact. False memories are more difficult to dismiss, perhaps because the dissonance between fact and fiction causes a stronger emotional reaction within the limbic areas, which in turn interfere with one’s ability to use logic and reason in evaluation beliefs about the world. The more traumatic an event, the more likely the victim is to construct beliefs that border on the bizarre.