Eyewitness Identification under Stress

12 Key excerpts on "Eyewitness Identification under Stress"

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  eBook - ePub

  Memory for Everyday and Emotional Events

  • Nancy L. Stein, Charles J. Brainerd, Barbara Tversky, Peter A. Ornstein(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Studies of the effect of arousal on witness identification accuracy of adult subjects have been reviewed by Deffenbacher (1983, 1991). Deffenbacher concluded that for those studies in which the "violence level or intensity of personal threat has been successfully manipulated" (Deffenbacher, 1991, p. 388), higher levels of stress are associated with reduced eyewitness accuracy for the majority of subjects across 15 studies. This finding runs counter to the assumption among most criminal court judges that the veridical perception of eyewitnesses is aided by high arousal (Deffenbacher, 1983), and is contrary to a similar view expressed by a large number of prosecuting attorneys. In contrast, the sentiments of law enforcement personnel and criminal defense attorneys in several surveys are consistent with the finding that high arousal or stress will negatively impact eyewitness identification (Brigham, 1981; Brigham & Wolfskeil, 1983). Studies of laypeople's opinions, including those in mock jury studies, have produced equivocal findings. Some report a strong belief in stress as a facilitator of eyewitness accuracy (e.g., Hastie, 1980), whereas others find little support for this position (e.g., Deffenbacher & Loftus, 1982).

  If elevations in arousal or stress at the time of witnessing can impair eyewitness accuracy in adults, would similar results be seen with children? To answer this question, a series of studies were run using naturalistic settings where high levels of anxiety or fear might be present or live-event methodology where staged events could be introduced and later examined for retention (see Peters, 1991). Particular attention was given to selecting settings that were personally meaningful and involving for the subjects. Eyewitness research (mostly laboratory-based studies at this time) had been criticized on grounds of poor ecological validity or limited generalizability (Clifford, 1978). Therefore, children's eyewitness memory was studied in the context of visiting a dentist, having a strange man visit a day-care center, receiving a shot at an immunization clinic, and experiencing a realistic theft of money. Across these studies, a number of stress or arousal measures were employed. They included the use of subjective rating scales and behavioral indices of arousal (e.g., the Preschool Observational Scale of Anxiety, Glennon & Weisz, 1978). Memory tests evaluated the children's ability to recognize voices, previously seen faces, and physical surroundings, and to recall details associated with the events they witnessed. Although comparisons between the high-stress and low-stress subjects (or comparisons across high- and low-stress conditions in cases of within-subject stress manipulations) did not always yield significant effects on eyewitness memory, the impact, when reliable, was always

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  Criminological Approaches to International Criminal Law

  • Ilias Bantekas, Emmanouela Mylonaki(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Such a process may have occurred as a result of information acquired after the event, or the eyewitnesses may have supplanted information acquired before the event (e.g., knowledge that Kayishema was leading the attacks) into their memories of the event. We discuss research on post-event information below. Emotions and stress Perhaps no topic on eyewitness memory elicits more questions from members of the legal community as the way in which emotion or stress experienced by an eyewitness during a crime impacts on his or her memory of the event and the identity of the perpetrator. Common sense suggests that one could not possibly forget a traumatic event. Everyone has experienced emotional and stressful events in their lives and individuals often have vivid memories of such events; thus, the emotion and stress experienced by an eyewitness is often viewed as informative in court. Popular assumption seems to suggest that one should be less skeptical of eyewitnesses subjected to highly emotional and stressful events. Research does suggest that emotional memories are more vivid than unemotional memories; however, the degree of vividness does not necessar- ily imply a higher degree of accuracy. 111 Consider research conducted by 109 Ibid. 110 Dror et al., above note 56. 111 D. Reisberg and F. Heuer, “The Influence of Emotion on Memory in Forensic Settings”, in M. P. Toglia, J. D. Read, D. F. Ross, and R. C. Lindsay, (eds.), The Handbook of Eyewitness Psychology, (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007), Vol. I, at 81–110; see also R. Brown and J. Kulik, “Flashbulb Memories”, (1977) 5 Cognition 73. 180 cutler, lindsay and smith Crombag, Wagenaar, and Van Koppen, in which the authors questioned participants about an Israeli cargo plane that crashed in the suburbs of Amsterdam. 112 At 6:28 p.m. on October 4, 1992 a Boeing 747 from Israel crashed into an eleven-storey apartment building in Bijlmemeer, a southern suburb of Amsterdam.

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  Beyond Common Sense

  Psychological Science in the Courtroom

  • Eugene Borgida, Susan T. Fiske, Eugene Borgida, Susan T. Fiske(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Addi-tionally, although research has shown that high levels of stress impairs memory for events (Morgan et al., 2004), many people also believe that if a person is in a highly stressful situation, then their senses will be heightened and will cause them to remember things even better than they would if they were not under stress. When attorneys for the different parties or other jurors present a jury with two opposing sides that offer competing intuitions about the role of stress in memory, how will they ultimately decide which theory to accept and apply to the situation? This will depend on how convincing the arguments are 8 Eyewitness Identification 167 when they are originally offered and how they “fit” with the rest of the evidence for the crime. In the same comparison study of experts’ and nonexperts’ under-standing of the factors that influence eyewitness testimony, a statisti-cally significant difference was found between the percentage of experts (95%) and nonexperts (68%) who agreed with the statement that “police instructions can affect an eyewitness’s willingness to make an identification and/or the likelihood that he or she will identify a par-ticular person” (Kassin & Barndollar, 1992). According to the analyses conducted in the study, this indicates that this statement is beyond common knowledge, even though over 50% of the potential jurors who read this statement agreed with the experts. What percentage of nonexperts would need to agree with a statement for it to be consid-ered common knowledge? We cannot expect people to be in agree-ment with each statement 100% of the time before we decide that the statement is common knowledge. After all, even the experts in the field do not agree 100% of the time. In 1992 eyewitness researchers were split (57% agreed and 43% disagreed) regarding the statement that “the presence of a weapon impairs an eyewitness’s ability to accurately identify the perpetrator’s face” (Kassin & Barndollar, 1992).

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  Psychology and Law

  A Critical Introduction

  • Andreas Kapardis(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The report noted that: Trauma-focused psychological treatments (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, and Eye-Movement Disensitisation and Reprocessing) are recommended by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in England (NICE) rather than medication. 47 Discussion of these types of psychological therapy is beyond the scope of this book. The BPS (2008) report concluded that there is no clear consensus concerning the impact on eyewitness testimony of heightened stress during encoding and retrieval. The challenge for researchers continues to be to disentangle the complex relationship between stress and memory. According to the same report, there is agreement among researchers, however, that people who have experienced a traumatic event – ‘a situation in which the individual experienced, witnessed or was confronted with actual or threatened death, serious injury, or threat to the physical integrity of self or others’ – such as assault, sexual assault, road traffic accident, torture, robbery may evidence memory characteristics that seem different from everyday memories we are all familiar with (BPS 2008: 25). Fatigue : to examine the effect of physical exertion on memory for a witnessed event, Dixon, Blocksidge and Gabbert ( 2012 ) compared law enforcement officers who completed a live high-intensity physical assault exercise with a control group who did not. The experimental group showed significantly impaired recall and recognition performance. The authors concluded that their results support arousal-based competition accounts proposing differential allocation of resources under physiological arousal. Weapon focus : Firearms, especially handguns, feature in crime in the United States to a much greater degree than they do in the United Kingdom,

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  The Future of Forensic Psychology

  Core Topics and Emerging Trends

  • Sara Landström, Pär Anders Granhag, Peter J. van Koppen, Sara Landström, Pär Anders Granhag, Peter J. van Koppen(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  These models, supported by meta-analytic findings, suggest this is particularly the case when acute stress occurs within the same context as the encoding, that is, at the same time and space (Shields et al., 2017), as would occur in most eyewitness scenarios. Experimental results generally show that stressed participants outperform non-stressed participants on recognition tasks (e.g., Abercrombie et al., 2003 ; Vogel & Schwabe, 2016) as well as recall tasks (e.g., Smeets et al., 2007 ; Zoladz et al., 2014), though here too there are some exceptions (e.g., Goldfarb et al., 2019). Findings from a recent survey highlight this split between eyewitness and fundamental memory experts: whereas over three-quarters of fundamental memory experts agreed that experiencing stress during encoding of an event enhances memory for that event, only a third of eyewitness experts agreed (Marr et al., 2020). So how might the differing methodologies lead to such contrasting results? The typical methodologies of each field have various strengths and weaknesses for answering the question of how acute encoding stress affects eyewitness memory. With the goal of understanding how stress may affect eyewitness memory in applied settings, the eyewitness research field typically uses ecologically valid scenarios to examine this relationship. These stressors attempt to recreate scenarios that are similar to what an eyewitness would actually experience, for example, by exposing participants to novel, negatively arousing experiences, including electric shocks, violent videos, police officer training scenarios, and military survival school programmes. In addition, most of the to-be-remembered information stems from the same situation that is causing the stress, which has been shown to be an important moderator in the relationship between acute encoding stress and memory performance (e.g., Joëls et al., 2006 ; Shields et al., 2017)

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  Encyclopedia of Psychology and Law

  • Brian L. Cutler(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  For example, with respect to witnessing fac-tors, an expert might testify that witnesses are more likely to make false identifications when identifying a perpetrator of another race than when identifying a perpetrator of their race. Extreme stress associated with a violent crime inhibits a witness’s ability to accu-rately encode information. The presence of a weapon creates a “weapon focus” effect and increases the like-lihood of false identification. With respect to lineups, an expert witness might testify that false identifications are more likely with suggestive lineup instructions and when lineup members are presented simultaneously rather than sequentially. An expert witness might also testify that eyewitness confidence is not strongly related to identification accuracy and that eyewitness confidence levels can be inflated by information pro-vided by cowitnesses or investigators that validates the eyewitness’s selection from the lineup. Expert wit-nesses do not offer opinions about the accuracy of eye-witness identification in a given case. The decision to admit expert psychological testi-mony about eyewitness identification into court is normally left to the discretion of the trial judge, and the likelihood of admission varies considerably from state to state and in federal courts. Typical reasons for excluding expert psychological testimony about 278 ——— Expert Psychological Testimony on Eyewitness Identification eyewitness identification include the following. Many judges have ruled that the content of the expert testi-mony is merely a matter of common sense and, there-fore, of little benefit to jurors. Judges have also ruled that the research is not commonly accepted within the relevant discipline. Other judges have ruled that the testimony is not helpful to jurors, because it addresses only research and does not inform the jury about the accuracy of the identification in the specific case at trial.

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  Handbook of Psychology of Investigative Interviewing

  Current Developments and Future Directions

  • Ray Bull, Tim Valentine, Tom Williamson, Ray Bull, Tim Valentine, Tom Williamson(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 16, 106–117. Wells, G. L. & Olson, E. A. (2002). Eyewitness identification: Information gain from incriminating and exonerating behaviors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 8, 155–167. Wells, G. L., Olson, E. A. & Charman, S. D. (2003). Distorted retrospective eyewit- ness reports as functions of feedback and delay. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 9, 42–52. Wells, G. L., Memon, A. & Penrod, S. D. (2006). Eyewitness evidence: Improving its probative value. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 7, 45–75. Recent Developments in Eyewitness Identification Procedures in the United Kingdom Tim Valentine Goldsmiths, University of London Chapter Thirteen Handbook of Psychology of Investigative Interviewing: Current Developments and Future Directions Edited by Ray Bull, Tim Valentine and Tom Williamson © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Introduction In the initial stages of an investigation, the potential of eyewitness identifica- tion may be assessed from an interview with a witness. An initial interview will often involve taking a description of the perpetrator. In the absence of physical forensic evidence such as a DNA profile, investigators may rely on an eyewit- ness to provide the necessary identification. The interaction between the eyewitness and the police is critical to the reliability of identification evidence. The frailty of eyewitness identification has long been recognized. In response to public concern about the reliability of eyewitness identification following several wrongful convictions in the early 1970s, the British govern- ment established an enquiry into eyewitness identification chaired by Lord and Rod Munro Devon and Cornwall Police Carwyn Hughes Sussex Police 222 Handbook of Psychology of Investigative Interviewing Devlin. More recently, over 230 people wrongfully convicted in the USA have been exonerated by DNA evidence that was not available at their original trial.

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  Courts, Law, and Justice

  • William J. Chambliss(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  101 8 Eyewitness Testimony and Accuracy Lisa E. Hasel University of Florida A n eyewitness is a person who has observed a person commit a crime, or observed a likely suspect immediately before or after a crime was committed. Eyewitness testimony is when an eyewitness testifies in court about the identity of the person who committed the crime. An eyewit-ness identification is the process by which an eyewitness to a crime claims to recognize someone as being the person who committed the crime in question. Sometimes, the identification is based on what is called a showup , which is a one-on-one confrontation between the suspect and the eyewitness, arranged by police. However, this can be an extremely suggestive procedure. Often, the identification is made from confidentially viewing a lineup constructed by police, in which a suspect is embedded among known, innocent persons (fillers). Typically, there are six to eight fillers in a lineup. Sometimes, lineups are conducted in person (live lineups), but often they are conducted using photographs. A witness is said to have made a positive identification if the eyewitness identifies someone from the lineup, regardless of whether or not the eyewitness is accurate. Eyewitness testimony can be very powerful evidence against a defendant in a court of law, and has been a staple of the criminal investigation and 102 Courts, Law, and Justice conviction process for centuries. The level of confidence expressed by an eyewitness in an identification is often a strong predictor of juror verdicts. However, mistaken eyewitness identification is the primary cause of the con-viction of innocent people. Psychological scientists have accumulated con-siderable knowledge of the factors contributing to mistaken identification. Particular interest has been directed at police lineups. Errors can occur with surprising frequency, especially when the actual person who committed the crime is not in the lineup.

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  Psychology and Law

  International Perspectives

  • Friedrich Lösel, Doris Bender, Thomas Bliesener, Friedrich Lösel, Doris Bender, Thomas Bliesener(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Sometimes as in the studies of context and cross-racial identification, research may begin in the laboratory and then progress to field studies. In other instances, such as the differences in testimony between victims and bystanders, archival analysis or case studies may point to a neglected variable in field or laboratory studies. The direction of progression is not so important as ensuring that findings are replicated across a range of paradigms. Where repetition of an effect occurs - as in the cross-racial recognition and context reinstatement studies - we may feel confident in asserting a psychological truth in our training of police officers and statements to court officials. A failure of an effect to transfer to a real world setting will inevitably give rise to questions as to its robustness. Is it a weak effect, like the impact of face pose at presentation? Or is there a need for conceptual as well as empirical clarification, as in the case of unconscious transference? Clarification of such issues are essential if we are to satisfy our critics among lawyers (King 1986; Stone 1984) and our fellow psychologists (McCloskey & Egeth, 1983) of the validity of our science. Influencing Public Policy on Eyewitnessing 273 References Aronson, E. (1980). The social animal, 3rd ed. San Fransisco: Freeman. Benaji, M.R., & Crowder, R.G. (1989). The bankruptcy of everyday memory. American Psychologist, 44, 1185-1193. Brigham, J.C., Maass, Α., Snyder, L.D., & Spaulding, K. (1982). Accuracy of exewitness identification in a field setting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42, 673-680. Brown, E., Deffenbacher, K., & Sturgill, W. (1977). Memory for faces and the circumstances of the encounter. Journal of Applied Psychology, 62, 311-318. Clifford, B.R. (1976). The police as eyewitnesses. New Society, 36, 176-177. Clifford, B.R. (1978). A critique of eyewitness research. In M. Gruneberg, P. Morris, & R. Sykes (Eds.), Practical aspects of memory (pp. 199-209).

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  Evidence and Proof in Scotland

  Context and Critique

  • Donald Nicolson(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  P. Fisher and M. C. Reardon, ‘Eyewitness Identification’, in D. Carson , et al. (eds), Applying Psychology to Criminal Justice (2007); S. D. Gronlund, C. A. Goodsell and S. M. Andersen, ‘Lineup Procedures in Eyewitness Identification’, in Nadel and Sinnott-Armstrong, above n. 54. More specific references are given below. For an analysis of the Scottish position, see P. R. Ferguson, ‘Identification Evidence and Its Problems: Recommendations for Change’, in P. Duff and P. Ferguson (eds), Current Developments in Scottish Criminal Evidence Law (2017). 101 Section 1. 102 ‘Applied Eyewitness-Testimony Research: System Variables and Estimator Variables’ (1978) 36 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1546. The Physiological Context I 257 to the witness, the type of facts and conditions of observation are called ‘estimator factors’ because, while they may be manipulable in research, they cannot be controlled in real life by fact investigators, and hence their impact can only be estimated post hoc. 103 However, the process of identi-fying people in criminal proceedings carries with it additional problems arising from ‘system variables’ which can be controlled by fact investigators attempting to identify relevant persons. While the Scottish courts still accept dock identifications, 104 notwith-standing obvious problems with the persuasiveness of witnesses pointing out an accused as the perpetrator, police officers attempt to provide more cogent evidence of out-of-court identifications by holding line-ups including the suspect and (hopefully) similar-looking ‘foils’ (also called ‘stand-ins’, ‘fill-ers’ or ‘distractors’). If a foil is identified or no identification made, further investigation is required, but if the suspect is identified, this suggests that the witness is reliable and charges should be brought.

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  Wrightsman's Psychology and the Legal System

  • Edith Greene, Kirk Heilbrun(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  However, an instruction that incorporated information likely to be delivered by an expert preserved jurors’ sensitivity to the factors that influence eyewitness reliability (Ramirez, Zemba, & Geiselman, 1996). Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Children as Witnesses 113 These findings suggest that instructions that are issue-specific, tailored to the facts present in a par-ticular case, and based on scientific research findings might be most effective. Rather than providing only general directives about eyewitness evidence (e.g., “consider the conditions under which the identifica-tion was made”), they instruct jurors about scientific findings on relevant estimator and system variables and inform them how to incorporate this information into their decision-making. But one study that incorporated these sorts of instructions into a mock sexual assault trial found little evidence of a sensitization effect. Why? Surprisingly, jurors were sensitive to the quality of the identification evidence on their own, convicting in conditions where the identification conditions were good and acquitting when they were poor (Jones et al., 2017). Perhaps awareness of the problems of mistaken identifications has seeped into public consciousness in recent years. Children as Witnesses Sometimes a child is the only witness to a crime—or its only victim. A number of questions arise in cases where children are witnesses.

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  Children's Eyewitness Testimony and Event Memory

  • Martha E. Arterberry(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Whereas the information-processing framework is useful for organizing knowledge about and understanding the processes involved in event memory, reliable event memory is not just about attention, encoding, storage, and retrieval. There are other factors, including factors pertaining to the context, both internal (e.g., stress) and external (e.g., salience of the event) and factors pertaining to individuals (e.g., language skills) that intersect with memory for events and children’ s ability to report on them. To explore the topic of event memory and its implications for eyewitness testimony, research from other theoretical perspectives, including attachment theory and sociocultural theory, is included. 1.2 Overview This Element begins by identifying a number of topics that enlighten under- standing of children’ s event memory. Next, the Element considers one study in detail to understand the role of knowledge on short- and long-term memory of event details and to illustrate typical methodology used to study event memory. Following this study, the following topics are considered: memory for stressful events, children’ s ability to remember the temporal order of events and the spatial location of where events occurred, and the ways poorly worded ques- tions and/or intervening events (such as conversations about the event) may interfere with accurate reporting. Following an understanding of children’ s memory performance under ideal and nonideal conditions, the Element con- siders the ways that children differ in the areas of language development, understanding right from wrong and emotions, and cognitive processes and 5 Children’ s Eyewitness Testimony and Event Memory how these differences predict better (or worse) event memory. Finally, the Element turns to how potential jurors perceive children as eyewitnesses and how the findings of the research on children’ s event memory inform the best practices for interviewing children in criminal contexts.

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