7. L7 forensic cognition: emotion and memory Flashcards
Uses for forensic psychology
- Jury decision-making, effects of contradiction and ambiguity of evidence
- Profiling: characterising a suspect before there apprehended
- Risk assessment: custody decision
- Criminal responsibility: impacts of mental illness or drugs on behaviour
forensic psychology most relevant to cognition
Eye witness testimony
- Memory for traumatic events and crimes
- Accuracy of testimony
- Interview techniques
- Assessing credibility
- Mainly based on recall
Eye witness identification
- Mainly based on recognition
detail for emotional events
- This is often what judges are looking for details on plates, hair, eye colour, times of day, who said what
- Memory for emotional events is characterised by better memory for the gist but worse memory for the details
- this can be seen in the De Rijke example (false memories and recollection of details)
weapon focus effect
- If an attacker has a weapon, memory for details of appearance is impaired
- This is the effect of emotion (i.e., threat, anxiety)
- Or distinctiveness/salience? Very distinctive event (Mitchell et al., 1998, “celery focus effect”)
- Highly focused on weapon creates an Attentional tunnel
tunnel memory Safer (1999)
- Showed subjects 1 of 2 series of slides
- Identical except for a few slides
- One traumatic (e.g., woman gets throat slashed with knife)
- One neutral (e.g., woman gets handed keys)
- Followed by 4AFC slide recognition and asked which slide they saw in the study condition
- For the emotional condition 34% of participants inaccurately remembered being closer to the emotional event than they actually were
- Paid less attention to the details on the periphery
Cases of emotional memory failing to retrieve the gist
Crombag et al. (1996)
Talarico & Rubin (2003)
Talarico & Rubin (2003): Flashbulb memories
- Memory for 9/11 (vs. neutral event) after 1d, 1w, 6w, 32w
- elevated levels of confidence and perceived vividness (i.e. belief in their accuracy) rather than improved accuracy and consistency
- not greater accuracy but greater perceived accuracy
Crombag et al. (1996)
- flashbulb-like memories for events that were never witnessed (e.g., remembering seeing a particular plane crash on TV although there was no video footage of the crash)
Cases of emotional memory failing to retrieve the gist
implanted memories
- Parents provide events from childhood
- Participants interviewed about them
- Plus suggestion of one fictional event (e.g., getting sick after eating egg salad; being lost in a mall; riding a hot air balloon)
- Approx. 30% of participants develop detailed, often vivid memories of fictional event
- Can have impact on behaviour (e.g., less egg salad consumed)
Cases of emotional memory failing to retrieve the gist
memory of child sexual abuse
- Individuals were interviewed and there were people with
○ Continuous memories of CSA
○ Discontinuous (recovered) memories of CSA
§Spontaneous, random and surprising
§ Anticipated recover like in therapy - Corroborative evidence was sought (e.g., confession, other victims, etc.)
- 0% for recovered in therapy because memories can be created via suggestion
summary or emotional recollection of events and details
- While on average, emotion improves (gist) memory, this can be explained by general memory principles (e.g., distinctiveness), and need not rely on a “special” mechanism
○ Although: Emotion modulates memory through amygdala activation (Phelps, 2004) - Memory can still fail
○ impaired memory for detail
○ even entirely false memories of emotional events - Perceived reliability of emotional memories is inflated (both introspectively and in public opinion)
Post-event information effects
- Events that happen after the critical even are not neutral
- They often disturb memory
- What does post event information do to the original information?
Misinformation effects (loftus, 1978)
- the car, stop sign give way sign etc
- three conditions: control, consistent and inconsistent
- People in the inconsistent group started favouring the wrong answer suggested during questioning
- People absorb suggestive information presented after the event and reproduce it later on
Is this due to altered memory or response bias/strategy? - To find this there is an unbiased test alternative
- Stop sign in the slides
- Give way sign misleading question
- Then when asked to recollect given the choice of lights or stop sign
- If memory for STOP altered or impaired, misinformation effect should show up even with novel test alternative— and it does, but the effect is smaller (Payne et al., 1994)
- People can have a strategy/bias to report most recent information
- but—as demonstrated by unbiased test—post event misinformation also directly alters memory for event because it…
○ is more recent = stronger (remember temporal distinctiveness?)
○ interferes with event retrieval
(or partially overwrites event memory)
boundary conditions for post-event misonformation
- Misinformation needs to be plausible
- Source needs to be credible
- therefore Misinformation effects can be reduced if credibility or believability of source is questioned
combating post-event misinformation effects
- Public statement early after the events
- Warnings: “Some of the questions contained misleading information”
○ Undermines credibility
○ Increases strategic monitoring - Timing
○ Vulnerability grows with delay between event and misinformation
Forgetting of event details over time
cognitive interview
what is it
based on two theories
Police aim to get better information from interviewees based on two theories of memory:
- Encoding specificity (e.g., Tulving, 1983)
○ Only those cues present at encoding are effective at retrieval
○ Encourage witnesses to reinstate context * What was the weather like? * How were you feeling?
○ What did you smell?
○ Encourage witnesses to recall everything, no matter how trivial—this may cue recall of something important
○ In reality, witness is often interrupted (every ~12s) and recall of trivial details is discouraged - Associative network theory (e.g., Bower, 1981)
○ Retrieval benefits from activation of as many different pathways as possible
○ Repeated recall attempts from different perspectives
○ What would someone have seen from the other side?
○ What would you have seen as a bird?
○ Recall events in varied order
○ Proceed forward and/or backward from different points
Also helps to assess credibility
effectiveness of the cognitive interview
Cons
Geiselman et al. (1985)
- 35% additional material recalled
- No substantial increase in errors
- Accuracy around 90%
George & Clifford (1995)
- Hertfordshire police (U.K.) trained in CI techniques
- Actual witnesses randomly allocated to CI or conventional follow-up interview
- CI secured five times as much information per question as conventional techniques
cons
- Time-consuming
- Takes a lot of training
- Need cooperative witnesses
