The Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale

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Interrogative suggestibility can be defined as ‘the extent to which, within a closed social interaction, people come to accept messages communicated during formal questioning, as the result of which their subsequent response is affected’ (Gudjonsson and Clark, 1986, p.84). Gudjonsson and Clark (1986) proposed a few distinguishing features of interrogative suggestibility. First, questioning process is involved relating to past events. Second, at lower range it has significant relationship with memory and intelligence (Gudjonsson, 1988a). Third, one of the essential factors is the acceptance of suggestion offered by the interrogator. Blagrove (1996) suggested that sometimes questions can be leading. Study done by Blagrove (1996) showed than participants who were sleep-deprived were more susceptible to suggestibility than controls. Blagrove (1996) proposed that sleep-deprived individuals were more prone to reduced cognitive abilities and motivation. He explained that some questions might imply a piece of information with which the interviewee might not agree initially. For instance, sometimes the interviewer might make a suggestion for an answer.

Gisli H. Gudjonsson (1984, 1987) developed the Gudjonsson suggestibility scale (GSS) to measure individual’s susceptibility to suggestions. There were two versions of the scale, the first suggestibility scale (GSS1) and the second suggestibility scale (GSS2). Both suggestibility scales contains an audio clip of a short story related to some incident. The participants had to listen to the audio clip and answer some questions related to the story. The questions asked to the participants were mostly leading. In other words, the questions could not be correctly answered from the information ...

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...to score higher on both yield and shift than adults (Gudjonsson and Henry, 2003). On contrary, study done by Polczyk et al. (2004) provided evidence that older adults scored higher on yield than younger adults in GSS 2.

As discussed earlier, there have been many studies that have tried to find the trend between sleep and suggestibility (Balgrove, 1996; Horne, 1988b). Researchers have also tried to find the effects of sleep-deprivation (Payne, Ellenbogen, Walker, and Stickgold, 2008b; Dingo & Kribbs, 1991). The main aim of this study is to find the relation between sleep and suggestibility. The current research has hypothesized that people who have sufficient sleep are less likely to be susceptible to suggestibility and leading questions compared to the participants who had less/no sleep. The current study has also investigated if age is correlated with yield 1.

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