Elisabeth Loftus’ research has been found to be very important for crime investigations. Loftus has proven that a person’s memory can become plagued by suggestion. In crime investigations Loftus’ research has been able to help juries make a decision on a person’s innocence based off of the accusers, witness, or defendant’s memory. In one of her experiments she had family members tell an individual, a lie that they had gotten lost in the mall when they were a child, as well as, three other facts that were true from the individual’s childhood. Loftus then went back to the individuals and asked them about the day they got lost in the mall. All of the participants went on to talk about the incident in great detail, as if it had been true. Loftus …show more content…
One of Loftus most important conclusions was that a person’s mind fills in gaps that are in our memory. Loftus came up with this conclusion during her experiment where she had families tell one of the family members that they had gotten lost in a mall as a child. The participants were then asked by Loftus if they remembered the event. One of the individuals was able to remember the incident in great detail, even though the event had never happened. This individual recalled, “… I went over to look at the toy store, the Kay Bee store and uh, we got lost… then this old man, he was wearing blue flannel, came up to me…”(Slater, p. 187). These details had not been provided in the in the suggestion. Slater states, “…apparently our minds abhor blank sports, are existentially unprepared for emptiness. We fill in.” (p. 187). Another important conclusion for Loftus’ research on memory is that there is no evidence of repression. Loftus believes that repression does not exist, instead they are “…false memories suggested by therapists and self-help books…”(Slater, p. 196). After researching the subject she found that people who had suffered from trauma remembered what happened obsessively. Slater remarks that there are no cases of victims of the Holocaust who forget they were ever in a concentration camp. A third important conclusion brought from Loftus’ research
Martha Euphemia Lofton Haynes was the first African American women to earn a PH.D in mathematics. She was the first and only child of William S. Lofton, a dentist and financier, and Lavinia Day Lofton. Euphemia Lofton Haynes was born Martha Euphemia Lofton on September 11, 1890 in Washington D.C. In 1917 she married her childhood sweetheart Dr.Harold Appo Haynes. They knew each other very well, as they grew up in the same neighborhood when they were teenagers. They both attended, and graduated from M St. High school. Her husband graduated from M St high school in 1906, a year earlier than she did. During their marriage they were highly focused on their careers, and didn’t have any children.
The imaginative recreation of sport as play has become the world. There is not the slightest sign here of any other reality; even the existence of a creator external to the play-world may now only be inferred (Berman 219).
Memory is everything to the human society. We communicate and build relationships off of our memories through the stories we tell. We are natural story tellers and have been telling stories since the beginning of time. More than half of the human race lives their lives based off of stories told by others such as culture, religion, and our general history. Have you ever asked yourself how real are these stories? Not saying that they are false, but it has been recently revealed that memory is false. So if memories are false then that would mean the stories that are being told are false. You probably looking at me as if I’m crazy but if you pay attention you will understand by the end of this essay. “It has been proven
When in America, Helen found that it was hard not to talk about past and the stories of her imprisonment. “Some survivors found it impossible to talk about their pasts. By staying silent, they hoped to bury the horrible nightmares of the last few years. They wanted to spare their children and those who knew little about the holocaust from listening to their terrible stories.” In the efforts to save people from having to hear about the gruesome past, the survivors also lacked the resources to mentally recovery from the tragedy.
Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus’ main focus in the 1975 journal article, “Leading Questions and the Eyewitness Report”, was on the influence of leading/misleading information in terms of both visual imagery and wording of questions in relation to eyewitness testimony. The problem that she investigated was that the questions asked about an event shortly after it occurs may distort the witness’ memory for that event. The research hypothesis was that the wording of questions asked immediately after an event may influence responses to questions asked considerably later and when the initial question contains either true or false presuppositions, the likelihood is increased that subjects will later report having seen the presupposed object.
In chapter 8, Lost in the Mall, Slater tells us about Elizabeth Loftus. She is a professor at the University of Washington and an experimental psychologist who does research about human memory. She learned about to men who believed different things about human memory and decided to challenge them. The first was Plato. He believed that in a form of absolute or ideal memory. He thought memory would appear completely preserved. The second was Freud. He claimed that memory was a reduplication of a dream and fact. He believed memories were repressed. Loftus believed that people tend to confuse things between memory and imagination. She wanted to prove people could distort memories and also make up fake memories. False memory is an apparent recollection
Kowalski, M.(1998, December). Applying the "two schools of thought" doctrine to the repressed memory controversy. The Journal of Legal Medicine. Retrieved September 14, 2000 from Lexis-Nexis database (Academic Universe) on the World Wide Web: http://www.lexis-nexis.com/universe
The implausibility of the various methods of the detection of deception poses an immense threat to the innocent. When we apply these results to a defendant on trial, these "false results" can be extremely detrimental to the case. False results can possibly allow the guilty to be liberated and the innocent to become incarcerated. The only way we can apply these tests and use the results as court evidence is if we can make the testing procedures 100% reliable. But, as research shows us, because of the numerous influential environmental, psychological, social, and physiological factors that can damage the validity of the results, the test results will remain obsolete in the eyes of the court.
These doubts appear through the assumption that objects can replace mental memory. The first of the three is ephemeral monuments, which suggests that “collective memory doesn’t dwell on material objects,” and we get rid of what we don’t want to remember (Forty 5). Then there is Freud with his theory of mental process stating that repression of the ego is similar to forgetting, which is often intentional and desired (Forty 5). The third doubt is the Holocaust memorials, as they both desire to simultaneously remember and forget, challenged by the commemoration of the event without lessoning its severity (Forty 6). These problems illustrate how Western thought assumes forgetting to be more straightforward than it actually is.
If there is one thing that historians and genocide survivors have in common, it is the responsibility to accurately represent past events. For the historian, there is a wide breadth of past events that is the historian’s responsibility to accurately portray, but for the genocide survivor, there is typically only a singular historical episode worthy of accurate representation for their interests. In other words, genocide survivors must consistently relive their trauma through memory, memoirs, and other tools in an effort to combat what is the final stage of genocide, denial. This paper seeks to discuss these topics of memory, memoir, and genocide denial in an effort to elucidate the nuances that color the difficulty in achieving justice after
These issues usually center on inconsistencies that will appear with certain situations such as witness testimony. Several studies have been centered on the ever-changing testimony of an eyewitness as they often do not have total recall and the mind fills in the blanks. Later when testifying in court this memory recall issue can actually become more of an issue when facts that have been heard about the case can influence the testimony of witnesses as they begin to add information they have seen or heard into their version of the events and completely believe that the information they are giving actually happened according to Kitaeff (2011). Still another issue where forensic psychology is concerned centers around the ability of the witness to be persuaded or confused during cross examination making their testimony less than helpful as the jury often sees them as unreliable or even as
Greenfield, D. (2007). Introduction to forensic psychology. issues and controversies in crime and justice. Journal of Psychiatry & Law, 35(2), 201-201-204,105-106.
In the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stresses the importance of memory and how memories shape a person’s identity. Stories such as “In Search of Lost Time” by Proust and a report by the President’s Council on Bioethics called “Beyond Therapy” support the claims made in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Psychology has been a very controversial research topic throughout the years. The purpose of this research paper is to highlight why Ethics of Science, Methods in Psychology and The study of Repressed Memory are a controversial topic in Psychology. Beginning with Ethics of Science and how scientist should avoid thinking about Ethics and worry more about the research on hand . Methods in Psychology can be controversial too because some methods could lead to brake through research but due to some Ethics they can't be done. For last The study of Repressed Memory is controversial due to psychologists working on this topic for more than 20 years and not finding no really supporting evidence till a research was done by psychology science that brought
hiatric Association defines trauma as an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others (424). The term “trauma theory” first appears in Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience: Trauma , Narrative and History. She explains that “trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual's past, but rather in the way its very unassimilated nature — the way it was precisely not known in the first instance — returns to haunt the survivor later on” (4). Bessel A. Van Der Kolk observes that traumatic memories may be deciphered differently than memories for normal events (Van Der Kolk). He suggests that traumatic memories are experienced as fragments.