Remember that? A comparison of real-time versus retrospective recall of smoking lapses.

Research and treatment assessments often rely on retrospective recall of events. The accuracy of recall was tested using accounts of smoking lapse episodes from 127 participants who had quit smoking, and lapses and temptations were recorded in near-real time using a hand-held computer. These computer records were compared with retrospective accounts elicited 12 weeks later, with a focus on recall of lapses in 4 content domains: mood, activity, episode Triggers, and abstinence violation effects. Recall of lapses was quite poor: Average kappas for items ranged from 0.18 to 0.27. Mean profile rs assessing recall for the overall pattern of behavior were .36, .30, .33, and .44 for these domains, respectively. In recall, participants overestimated their negative affect and the number of cigarettes they had smoked during the lapse, and their recall was influenced by current smoking status. The findings suggest caution in the use of recall in research and intervention. Clinicians and behavioral scientists rely on participants' retrospective reports for their information. Many inquiries request summaries of respondents' behavior to yield estimates of event frequencies or accounts of typical behavior. Accurate retrieval of such "generic personal memories" (Brewer, 1994) requires that respondents not only recall relevant data but also summarize it. Other inquiries focus on specific, episodic personal memory, or recall of a particular episode (Brewer, 1994), with no requirement for summary. Examples abound: research on the details of medical encountets, traumatic experience, pain, and recall of addiction relapse episodes, which is our focus here. Clinical practitioners rely even more heavily than researchers on recall of events. Research on autobiographical memory suggests, however, that recall of events is highly prone to error and bias. This literature suggests that recollection is not simply the direct retrieval of information from a decaying archive. Instead, memory seems to rely on heuristic strategies to reconstruct recalled events (see Bradburn, Rips, & Shevell, 1987). Recall for a particular episode can be disrupted by interference from similar events that have occurred either before or after the episode (Bradburn et al., 1987). Recall of particular events is often guided--and