Psychological Factors Of Eyewitness Testimony: Deterumatic Events, And Experiences

Research has found that eyewitness testimonies can be affected by many psychological factors: Stress/anxiety, reconstruction memory, weapon focus and leading questions.

Stress and anxiety is highly likely to be experienced and associated with traumatic events or experiences. Clifford and Scott’s (1978) research found that people who had watched a film about a violent attack remembered less of the forty items of information about the event compared to a group who watched a less violent or stressful version. This is likely to be more intensified witnessing a real life crime or experiencing a traumatic event. Yuille and Cutshall’s (1986) research contradicts this. Their research found that people who witnessed a real life incident i.e. a gun shooting

He suggests that we tend to see and in particular interpret and recall what we see according to what we expect and assume is normal in a given situation. Barlett referred to these as ‘schemas’ and suggested that these schemas may, in part be determined by social values and prejudice. They are capable of distorting unfamiliar or unconscious unacceptable information so that they can fit in with our existing knowledge (schemas), which can therefore result in unreliable eyewitness testimony. Bartlett’s famous study ‘War of the Ghosts’ showed that memory is not just a factual recording of what has happened but that we try to fit what we remember with what we really know and understand about the world, which may help to explain why we quite often change our memories so they become more sensible to us. In his study, participants heard a story and then were asked to tell the story to another person and so on. The story was a North American folk tale. Each person seemed to recall it in their own individual way. With repeated telling, the tale became shorter, ideas were rationalised, changed or omitted to become more

Her main focus has been on the influence of leading and in particular misleading information in terms of both visual imagery and wording of questions in relation to eyewitness testimony. Loftus’ findings seem to suggest that memory for an event that has been witnessed is highly flexible. If someone is exposed to new information during the interval between witnessing the event and recalling it, this new information may have marked effects on what they recall. The original memory can be modified, changed or supplemented. The fact the eyewitness testimony can be unreliable and influenced by leading questions is illustrated by the psychology study by Loftus and Palmer (1974) Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction. This looked at the hypothesis that the language used in eyewitness testimony can alter memory. This aimed to show that leading questions could distort eyewitness testimony accounts with gaps in the memory because the account would become distorted by cues provided in the