Recommended: False memories cognitive interviews
“False Confessions: Causes, Consequences, and Implications for Reform”. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 17, No. 4 (2008) 249–53. Accessed Sept. 22, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20183294.
It is unlikely that social consequences of false memories can be avoided. Elizabeth Loftus was intrigued to study false memories, and is perhaps personally responsible for subsequent developments throughout the history of false memories. Some of this history addresses various theories aimed at isolating how or why false memories occur. These include Source Monitoring Framework, Activation Monitoring Theory, Fuzzy Trace Theory, and strategies for persuasion which can lead to the development of false memory. Such persuasion leads to the present discussion concerning how persuasion in the judicial system has created false confessions and wrongful eyewitness testimonies, due to the Misinformation Effect.
It is hard to believe that over seventy percent of convictions overturned through DNA testing were based on false eye witness testimonies. Due to conflict and hesitation in eye witness’s long term memory, testimonies from them are frequently inaccurate and give distorted information on the crime. The demanding process of encoding, storing, and later retrieving memory all takes place during a rather rapid and stressful period of events, making the procedure all the more tedious for the witness. For this reason, eye witness testimonies are now seen as unreliable for giving flawed results and have been slowly replaced with more modern means of finding evidence such as DNA testing.
Johnson states that according to the APA, “it is not possible to distinguish repressed memories from false ones without corroborating evidence” (par. 2). This brings up a critical issue how could the jury decide if a memory was false or a repressed one that was eventually remembered. According to Johnson, the three stages of memory are encoding, Consolidation/Storage, and retrieval (par. 3) An error at any stage of the memory process can lead to the creation of false memories (par. 4). Johnson suggests that under extremely traumatic events false memories have a significant chance of being formed.
In this story is the third chapter from The Grapes of wrath, the narrator is John Steinbeck. The novel tells the story of the Joads and family of farm workers struggling to survive the devastating drought in Oklahoma during the Great Depression. Steinbeck description the turtle and the landscape through which it struggles can be related to Joads and their struggles on their journey. The main idea, Obstacle, tolerance, and struggling.
He takes his children on a trip, one that they say they will "remember... for always. " Even though the trip was not real, the children got amazing memories they would cherish their whole lives. Though the ending of the story is optimistic and Bodoni’s little trick is not revealed and has only positive effects, the problem of lying to children is extremely topical. There are many disputes among psychologists about
Rather than the harsh truth, sometimes a pleasant lie or no truth at all is necessary when easing a child into a world they do not yet fully understand. This perspective provides justification as to why parents may feel the need to preserve their child’s ignorance and limit the amount of information they receive. Santos suggests that in doing so, parents create a false sense of reality or offer an "optimistic world" (Abad-Santos, 2023) to their children. Here, the term "optimistic" reveals one’s innocence at a young age and provides support for the notion that withholding truths that contradict this ideal reality is beneficial in the long
Silentia the name of the character in the book Silence translated by Sarah Roche-Mahdi focused mainly on the life of a girl, who was brought up as a boy in order to inherit from her parents. Silentia parents Cador and Eufemie instructed her, as well as the people who raised her to conceal her nature being born a girl because women could no longer inherit in King Evan’s land. Due to two counts that fought over the inheritance of twin daughters and both counts died enraging King Evan to demand this law. Silentia name throughout the book is significant because through it, holds her identity. Silentia struggles with her identity throughout the book having a push and pull between her Nature and Nurture.
Emma Bryce, a science and environmental journalist wrote an article for WIRED titled “False memories and false confessions: the psychology of imagined crimes”. She bases her article on the experience of a criminal psychologist, Julia Shaw and studies of a cognitive psychologist, Elizabeth Loftus. The article describes several cases where false memories resulted in getting innocent people in jail. Julia’s job is to study what triggers false memories we encounter every day and how the results of her studies can be applied to the criminal-justice system where it is very important to detect them. As she said, unfortunately, the police still makes a lot of mistakes that put innocent people in prison, so her job is to fix this by providing scientific
People do this to information by trying to put it in our schemas. Schemas can also question the reliability of eyewitness testimony, as they can cause distortion to memory or unconsciously modify information in order to relate with our current knowledge/ schemas. This can be seen in Bartlett’s study, where participants heard a story and had to recall and tell to another person, like “Chinese Whispers”. Each participant recalled the story in their individual interpretation such as; the passages became shorter, ideas and details of the story were modified. This suggests that each individual person reconstructs our own memories to conform to our personal beliefs about the world.
It is a widely-known popular believe that hypnosis can unlock repressed or hidden memories. With so many television shows and movies suggesting that the use of hypnosis may help a witness to remember the face of a criminal or the exact details of an event, it is no surprise that hypnosis has taken root as a credible method of memory retrieval. As an article from the American Psychological Association states, “… people may believe hypnotically induced memories are more reliable, mirroring a mistaken cultural belief that hypnosis acts like a truth serum. Hypnosis is "on thin ice" when used to recover memories, as is the case with most other memory retrieval techniques” (Smith).
Eye witness identification involves selecting an accused perpetrator from a police line up, sketch or being at the crime scene during the murder time. After selecting a suspect, witnesses are asked to make a formal statement confirming the ID of the suspect (s) or other surrounding details which the eyewitness can testify in court. Eyewitnesses are always required to testify in court but eyewitnesses with psychological disorders, substance dependancy are at a higher chance of identifying the wrong suspect therefore wrongfully assisting convict the perpetrator in the wrong (Hal Arkowitz, Scott O. Lilienfeld, January 1, 2010). Anxiety or stress is always associated with crimes involving traumatic events that have previously taken place.
This highlights the issue of post event information, and how easily it can sway an individual’s recollection of events. Gabbert et al (2004) further looked into this, in this study participants viewed a crime video and were later exposed to four pieces of misinformation about it; presented by a confederate or in a written narrative. Gabbert found that participants were less accurate in recall after they received misinformation, and misinformation given socially was significantly more misleading. Further studies for this misinformation effect comes from Loftus, Miller and Burns (1978), here participants (undergraduate students) watched a slide show of a car driving and then hitting a pedestrian. Some participants were then asked the leading question “how fast was the car travelling when it passed the yield sign?”
One famous case of amnesia supporting Squire's view is patient H.M. (Scoville & Milner, 1957), who had parts of his left and right temporal lobe, hippocampus, amygdala and surrounding areas of both removed. He developed severe anterograde amnesia, the inability to learn new information, resulting in an almost completely absent short-term memory storage. He also had moderate retrograde amnesia, unable to remember information between 3 to 11 years prior to his surgery, but with other long-term memories unaffected. Explaining this, Squire argued that memories are consolidated in the hippocampus, easily disrupted by trauma during this. They become less dependent on the hippocampus with time, eventually being stored in the neocortex (Alvarez &
In conclusion I found the research quite fascinating. I believe that any type of experience if positive or negative has a profound impact in your life and will always subconsciously influence your decision making. But, that our life experiences influence our thought process in repressed memory situations that we can’t predict is beneficial consciously or unconsciously take repressed memory to a whole another realm. Cited references Sifferlin, A. (2014, March).
