In psychology, false memory syndrome is a condition in which an individual's identity and social relationships are affected by false memories of trauma, which are factually incorrect reassemblies that the individual strongly believes. The term was coined in part by Peter J. Fried when explaining what he called a false accusation after his daughter Jennifer Fried accused him of sexual assault, and his later work The Basis of False Memory Syndrome helped popularize the concept. The concept that individuals are capable of forming false memories and that external influences may be involved in the formation of such memories is widely accepted among scholars. However, false memory syndrome has not been classified as a psychiatric disorder in any medical manual, including the tenth revision of the International Classification of Diseases and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. False memory syndrome is likely a result of recovered memory therapy, which is also one of the terms defined by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in the early 1990s, and refers to a group of therapeutic approaches that can induce the process of confabulation. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus is considered the most prominent and influential figure in the development of this theory. Human memory is highly suggestive and novel, and a wide variety of frightening, embarrassing, and harmless memories can be created through a variety of techniques—including guided imagery, hypnosis, and suggestion by others. Although not all individuals exposed to these techniques have been successfully recreated, experiments suggest that they can be recreated in a significant number of people, who will actively defend the existence of these false events, even after being informed that they are false and deliberately planted. Questions about the possibility of false memories have generated a tremendous interest in the suggestibility of human memory, allowing for a dramatic increase in knowledge about how memories are encoded, stored, and retrieved, culminating in a series of groundbreaking experiments such as the Lost in the Mall experiment. In the Roediger and McDermott experiment, the researchers presented a group of subjects with a list of items to study. When asked to recall these items, subjects were more likely to recall some of the nonexistent words with linguistic relevance than the studied items, creating false memories. Despite its widespread replication, this experiment remains controversial, as it is possible that subjects tended to store the linguistically related items from the word list conceptually rather than as a language, which would explain the errors in word recall without creating false memories. Susan Clancy found that subjects who claimed to be victims of alien abduction were more likely to remember the linguistically related words than to remember the control set of words in the experiment. The Lost in the Mall experiment is a research method designed to implant a false memory of being lost in a shopping mall as a child in order to discuss the ability to create a “memory” of a nonexistent event when discussing the false event. In her initial study, Elizabeth Loftus found that 25% of subjects developed a “memory” of a previously nonexistent event. Extensions and perversions of the mall-lost technique showed that an average of one-third of study participants could be convinced that they had experienced things that were not real in their childhood, even when those things involved traumatic or impossible experiences. Experimental researchers demonstrated the ability to modify memory cells in the hippocampus of mice to create artificial false memories.