Forensic Psychology Flashcards
When was forensic psychology recognised by APA
2001
How rapidly growing is the pbs forensic department
1977 = 105 members 2008 = 1996 members
Examples of forensic psychology
Working within court
Working within organisations
Working with offenders
Working with victims
What is the clinical role of a psychologist in court?
Assessing whether people are fit to stand trial through clinical interviews
What is an issue with the ways of assessing whether someone is fit to stand?
There is a standard set of measurements to determine whether people are fit to stand trial or not but they are performed by different psychologists each with their own take on manuals etc.
It is almost impossible to standardise testing
What are the general clinical problems that clinical psychologists in court may face?
Different methods of assessing mental illness are flawed in various ways
- thoughts of stigma
- social and cultural norms
- maladaptivity, impairment and distress
What is the role of an actuarial psychologist in court?
Presents evidence on the probability of events occurring in court
What is the role of an experimental psychologist in court?
Conducts an experiment that is directly related to the case in order to present evidence for or against a case
Loftus and Palmer, 1974
found that when people watched a video of a car crash and were asked the speed of the cars when they ‘contacted’ ppts. estimated 30mph whereas when the word ‘smashed’ was used they estimated 40mph
they then did a follow up study and found that people were more likely to report seeing broken glass when the word smashed had been used.
Weinberg, 1983
found that it was not just the answers to questions that changed but the actual memory itself was altered by misleading information.
Yuille and Cutshall, 1986
studied a real life armed robbery and found that witnesses were 80% accurate 3 months later. although the inaccuracies were mainly on important things such as weight, height and age of people.
they also found that people who reported higher levels of anxiety had worse recall on average than those with lower anxiety levels
Bruce and Young, 1998
found that people were good at recognising familiar faces in different contexts and were 90% accurate at recognising unfamiliar faces as long as the lighting, angle and context were not significantly different
Messer and Brigham, 2001
found that people were much worse at identifying unfamiliar faces of a different race to their own.
Loftus et al., 1987
found that recall dropped to just 20% accuracy when a weapon was present
Fawcett et al., 2014
argued that it was not weapon focus but unexpectedness, the same levels of recall were found for a gun in a tennis court and a tennis racket in a gun range
Valentine and Mesout, 2009
found that participants who reported high levels of anxiety in the London dungeon had worse recall of details than those who reported lower levels of anxiety
Geiselman, 1985
developed the cognitive interview
Fisher, 1987
developed the enhanced cognitive interview
what is one main issue with research into EWT?
all the studies except Yuille and Cutshall are done in artificial situations where anxiety and other factors are not taken into account. this means that research lacks external validity
what are some issues with the Yuille and Cutshall study?
- it does not take into account the possible impact of post-event discussion which alters memory
- low internal validity
Peterson and Kemp, 2006
found that co-witness discussion, especially when communicated indirectly via news or social media had a more significant impact on the amount of false information given than any other form of misleading information
Wentura, 2002
the effects of misleading information - especially post-event discussion, were negatively correlated with working memory capacity so there are large individual differences in the effects of misleading information
Ioannou (2017)
found that EWT was the main form of evidence in 20% of criminal investigations and that 75% of false convictions were due to false EWT.
Kohnken et al., 2008
found that the CI produced an effect size of .96 for correct information
also found a .28 increase in incorrect information from the standard interview
no difference between the two in terms of overall accuracy rates
Memon et al., 1993
found that the CI was effective with children (which is good as it was also found that they are particularly susceptible to misleading information) and provides more accurate information about locations of people and objects
Vollano and Compo, 2011
found that building rapport in the ECI increased the accuracy of information given
Leo, 2009
found that when people seemed anxious or stressed they were more likely to be thought of as guilty by police and were therefore more likely to give a false confession. the ECI builds rapport and relaxes the interviewee so false confessions are less likely
Vrij et al., 2010
found that people who were lying had a greater cognitive load than those telling the truth and so by using components of the CI such as reversing the order or changing perspective they were more likely to make mistakes due to cognitive overload whereas people telling the truth would not as they have a lower cognitive load
what is a problem with the CI and ECI?
- it takes a lot more time to conduct a cognitive interview than a standard interview
- it requires more specialist training than the standard interview
- this means that police officers are often not trained in the full process as it is too expensive
Levi, 2002
found that increasing the size of a line up does nothing to increase its accuracy
Cabeza et al., 1999
found that when people were presented with photographs of suspects, they tended to create a prototype average from these photos and change their memory of the event to this.
Doob and Kirschenbaum, 1973
created the ‘mock witness paradigm’ to test whether there is bias in a lineup. mock witnesses listen to a verbal description of the suspect and pick someone out of the lineup. each person in the lineup should be picked an equal amount of times by people who had not seen the actual person.
Wright, 2008
found that 60% of witnesses to real crimes in the UK discussed both ‘crime scene details’ and ‘suspect details’ with co-witnesses
Peterson and Kemp, 2011
surveyed police officers and found that the majority were aware that co-witness discussion had negative impacts on the accuracy of EWT but also reported that they were often unable to stop co-witness discussion from occurring.
four parts of the cognitive interview
- report everything
- reverse the order
- reinstate the context
- change perspective
what does the ECI add to the CI
Rapport building between interviewer and interviewee
