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We investigated whether enhanced jury instructions, which added empirical findings about confession evidence to standard jury instructions, could sensitize mock jurors to the confession evidence in a criminal trial transcript. Participants (N = 314) read a detailed transcript of a simulated murder trial, followed by standard or enhanced jury instructions. The key evidence was the defendant's recanted confession, gathered by police using either coercive (weak case) or appropriate (strong case) tactics. For example, testimony in the weak case, but not the strong case, indicated that the suspect was likely intoxicated when interviewed, and that the police likely lied about the evidence against him and hinted at leniency if he confessed. Participants in the enhanced instruction groups rated the likelihood that the defendant killed the victim as significantly higher in the strong case than the weak case, and they were also significantly more likely to find the defendant guilty in the strong case. In contrast, participants in the standard instruction groups did not differ significantly in either rated likelihood of killing or verdict for the two cases. The results demonstrate that instructions can make jurors sensitive to the strength of confession evidence, rather than merely skeptical about confession evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A life-threatening traumatic experience can cause physical and psychological distress, but it can also be remembered with pride from having demonstrated one's courage and abilities under severe circumstances. Characteristics of the event, early response, as well as later personal reflection, together determine the individual's response to a traumatic event. We investigated how traumatic combat experiences and retrospective appraisals of those experiences affected reports of symptoms of posttraumatic stress and depression in 324 U.S. Army medics. Higher levels of combat experiences were associated with both appraisals of threat to life (r = .40) and appraisals of personal benefit of the deployment (r = .15). Threat appraisals were associated with increases (r = .33 and .29), whereas benefit appraisals were associated with decreases (r = -.28 and -.30, respectfully), in symptoms of posttraumatic stress and depression. These opposing mediation pathways led to weak or nonsignificant total effects, which concealed the effects of combat intensity on posttraumatic stress (R(2) = .28) and depression (R(2) = .24). Acknowledging the beneficial effects that a combat experience had on one's life was associated with less intense behavioral health symptoms and offset the detrimental effects of traumatic combat experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eyewitness error is one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions. In fact, the American Psychological Association estimates that one in three eyewitnesses make an erroneous identification. In this review, we look briefly at some of the causes of eyewitness error. We examine what jurors, judges, attorneys, law officers, and experts from various countries know about eyewitness testimony and memory, and if they have the requisite knowledge and skills to accurately assess eyewitness testimony. We evaluate whether legal safeguards such as voir dire, motion-to-suppress an identification, cross-examination, jury instructions, and eyewitness expert testimony are effective in identifying eyewitness errors. Lastly, we discuss solutions to eyewitness error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on a study about the occurrence of eyewitness error in U.S. trials. Topics discussed include percentage of wrongful convictions for which eyewitness error is involved, factors that jurors and legal professionals should take into consideration to spot eyewitness error and safeguards that have been put in place to detect eyewitness error and their level of effectiveness. Also discussed are suggestions on reducing the number of wrongful convictions due to eyewitness errors.

We investigated whether education can improve mock jurors' assessments of eyewitness accuracy in a criminal case. The interview-identification-eyewitness (I-I-Eye) teaching aid directed participants to attend carefully to how law enforcement interviewed the eyewitness and conducted the identification procedure, before considering what eyewitness factors during the crime might affect accurate identification. After viewing the I-I-Eye or one of two control aids, 293 undergraduate participants read a trial transcript about a criminal case that contained either strong or weak eyewitness evidence. The police consistently followed proper procedures for eyewitness evidence in the strong case, but not in the weak case. Only the I-I-Eye participants demonstrated sensitivity to the strong and weak eyewitness evidence by rendering more guilty verdicts in the strong compared with the weak case. The I-I-Eye teaching aid provides a framework for analyzing eyewitness testimony that may improve jurors' and legal professionals' assessments of eyewitness accuracy in criminal cases. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We surveyed 532 U.S. law enforcement officers about eyewitness factors, and how they conduct eyewitness interviews and identification procedures. There were 83 officers from departments that had implemented eyewitness reforms, and 449 officers from departments that had not implemented reforms. Officers from both samples had limited knowledge of eyewitness factors. They also reported conducting interviews and identification procedures in a manner that violated many provisions of the National Institute of Justice's Guide and Training Manual. Although officers in reform departments reported following more correct lineup procedures than officers in non-reform departments, the two groups did not differ in knowledge of eyewitness factors or in their use of proper interviewing procedures. Only 18% of the reform officers and 1% of the non-reform officers had both read the Guide and received training based on it. We discuss the implications of the present study for training U.S. law enforcement officers about eyewitness testimony. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Active participation in combat trauma increased reports of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms over passive witnessing of trauma. Using archival data from 376 U.S. soldiers who took part in the family interview component of the 1988 National Vietnam Veteran Readjustment Study (NVVRS), findings are that even after statistically accounting for witnessing combat trauma, U.S. soldiers who likely killed enemy soldiers in combat reported elevated levels of PTSD symptoms. Both inference and direct self-reports were used to measure killing in combat, and both measures accounted equally well for variance in PTSD symptoms. The likelihood of a soldier killing enemy combatants was also weakly related to his spouse's report of physical domestic violence in the past year. Diagnosing the mental health symptoms of combat soldiers should specifically assess whether they actively participated in wounding or killing the enemy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We compared what 160 U.S. judges, 57 law students, and 121 undergraduates know and believe about factors affecting the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. Judges were no more knowledgeable than were undergraduates, and both groups were less knowledgeable than were law students. For all 3 groups, increased knowledge of eyewitness factors was associated with beliefs that might reduce wrongful convictions. Participants in all 3 groups underestimated what potential jurors know about eyewitness testimony. The results suggest that increasing judges' knowledge of eyewitness testimony might help them to reduce wrongful convictions and to more accurately assess when eyewitness experts are needed. The results also suggest that law schools need to do a better job of educating law students about eyewitness testimony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study compared what prosecutors and defence attorneys know about eyewitness testimony, what they believe jurors know about eyewitness testimony, and what legal safeguards they think are necessary to educate jurors about eyewitness factors. A total of 73 prosecutors and 1184 defence attorneys completed a survey about eyewitness testimony. Both groups of attorneys had extensive experience practicing law and trying criminal cases. Prosecutors were significantly less knowledgeable than the defence attorneys on almost every issue including the weak relationship between eyewitness confidence and accuracy at trial, jurors' inability to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate eyewitnesses and the benefits of sequential lineups. The prosecutors were less willing than the defence attorneys to permit eyewitness expert testimony and were less sceptical of jurors' knowledge of eyewitness testimony. We highlight issues from the survey that are relevant to the training of prosecutors and defence attorneys about eyewitness testimony. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memory for the emotions evoked by past events guides people's ongoing behaviour and future plans. Evidence indicates that emotions are represented in at least two forms in memory with different properties. Explicit memories of emotion can be retrieved deliberately, in a flexible manner, across situations. Implicit memories of emotion are brought to mind automatically by cues resembling the context in which an emotional event occurred. One property they share, however, is that both types of memory are subject to forgetting and bias over time as people's goals and appraisals of past emotional events change. This article reviews the cognitive and motivational mechanisms that underlie stability and change in memory for emotion. We also address functions that remembering and misremembering emotion may serve for individuals and groups. Although memory bias is typically viewed as problematic, changes in representations of emotional experience often promote goal-directed behaviour and facilitate coping with challenging situations. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The present study aims to investigate how textual features, depth of citation treatment, reasons for citation, and relationships between citers and citees predict author-rated citation importance. Design/methodology/approach - A total of 49 biology and 50 psychology authors assessed the importance, reason for citation, and relationship to the cited author for each cited reference in his or her own recently published empirical article. Participants performed their evaluations on individualized web-based surveys. Findings - The paper finds that certain textual features, such as citation frequency, citation length, and citation location, as well as author-stated reasons for citation predicted ratings of importance, but the strength of the relationship often depended on citation features in the article as a whole. The relationship between objective citation features and author-rated importance also tended to be weaker for self-citations. Research limitations/implications - The study sample included authors of relatively long empirical articles with a minimum of 35 cited references. There were relatively few disciplinary differences, which suggests that citation behavior in psychology may be similar to that in natural science disciplines. Future studies should involve authors from other disciplines employing diverse referencing patterns in articles of varying lengths and types. Originality/value - Findings of the study have enabled a comprehensive, profound level of understanding of citation behaviors of biology and psychology authors. It uncovered a number of unique characteristics in authors' citation evaluations, such as article-level context effects and rule-versus affective-based judgments. The paper suggests possible implications for developing retrieval algorithms based on automatically predicted importance of cited references. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Male couples (N = 53) described their relationship history during an oral history interview, and partners also provided individual self-reports about relationship satisfaction, commitment, and quality. Although couple members were similar in satisfaction levels, they differed in commitment levels. An individual's expression of positive and negative emotions during the interview predicted both his own and his partner's current satisfaction, but predicted only his partner's satisfaction four years later. Furthermore, current and future relationship satisfaction was predicted not just by one's own, but also by one's partner's, perception of equality and attachment. In contrast, current and future commitment was predicted only by one's own perception of equality and attachment. Thus, predictors of satisfaction were both personal and interpersonal, but predictors of commitment were only personal. Separable individual- and dyadic-level processes underlie intimate relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a prospective longitudinal study examining recollections of suicidal content and correlates of accurate and inaccurate recollection. A primarily at-risk group of young adults (N = 78) who were initially assessed for suicidal ideation and behavior in adolescence, were asked to recall whether they had reported suicidal ideation or behavior about six years earlier. In recalling the previous interview, the majority of the participants provided consistent reports. However, with regard to those who had previously reported suicidal ideation or behavior, 38% failed to recall prior adolescent suicidal reports. Those who provided accurate reports of prior suicidal content were more symptomatic and were functioning more poorly than those who failed to recall past suicidal content. The implications for clinical assessment practices, research, and theory development are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a survey, 160 US judges indicated their knowledge and beliefs about eyewitness testimony. Although correct on some issues, judges were often wrong on important issues such as whether at trial eyewitness confidence is a good indicator of eyewitness accuracy, and if jurors can distinguish accurate from inaccurate witnesses. Increased knowledge was associated with: a willingness to permit legal safeguards, including expert testimony at trial; a belief that jurors have limited knowledge of eyewitness factors; a reluctance to convict defendants solely from eyewitness testimony; a more accurate estimate of the extent to which wrongful convictions result from eyewitness error; and a belief that judges need more eyewitness training. Additional training about factors and procedures that affect eyewitness accuracy may help judges reduce the number of wrongful convictions. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Experiment 1, 133 college student volunteers watched a rock music video with or without suicidal content and then completed written measures assessing mood, priming of suicide-related thoughts, perceptions of personal risk, sensitivity to suicidality in others, and attitudes/beliefs about suicide. In Experiment 2, 104 college student volunteers listened to rock music with either suicidal or neutral content and then completed measures similar to Experiment 1, with the addition of a hopelessness measure. In both experiments, participants exposed to suicidal content wrote more scenarios with suicide-related themes in a projective storytelling task than those exposed to nonsuicidal content. However, there were virtually no group differences on explicit measures of affect, attitudes, and perceptions. Music and videos with suicide content appeared to prime implicit cognitions related to suicide but did not affect variables associated with increased suicide risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study that investigated whether factors known to influence memory for events and attitudes, such as post-event knowledge and individual differences in emotional traits and states, also predict distortion in memory for emotions. Review of related literature; Comparison of the rates of anxiety and emotions among undergraduates before a midterm examination and a week after the examination; Results and implications.

At 6 months following the death of their spouse, 37 participants reported their grief-related symptoms and thoughts, and then, approximately 4.5 years later, they attempted to recall how they felt at the time of the 6-month report. Although participants were far less distressed at recall than initially, they recalled their 6-month grief rather accurately. Participants did however overestimate prior grief-related intrusive ideation. Participant's current level of grief predicted what they recalled slightly better than the actual initial grief. Conversely, what they recalled predicted current levels of grief across various measures. Participants whose grief diminished relatively little over time tended to overestimate prior grief more. The retrospective reappraisal that one's past grief was not severe may indicate effective coping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two prior studies, item-level analyses of the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-II (MCMI-II) and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2) were conducted to construct an MCMI-II scale and an MMPI-2 scale that could discriminate priest same-sex ephebophiles from priests with nonsexual psychiatric disorders. The resulting 11-item MCMI-II scale and the 16-item MMPI-2 scale were combined in the present study to determine if they can better discriminate these two groups than either scale by itself The ability of the combined 11-item scale from the MCMI-II and the 16-item scale from the MMPI-2 (i.e., the combined scale) to discriminate the two groups when compared to the ability of these scales individually to discriminate these two groups was statistically significant. Not only did the Combined-Scale classify more participants correctly than the individual scales, but unlike the 11-item MCMI-II scale its internal consistency was more robust. It was further suggested that though specially constructed scales from objective personality tests are useful in identifying priest ephebophiles, they must be used in conjunction with other methods of identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the difference between the traditional diseases screening programs and the screening programs which seek to identify the persons with reducible risk factors. The reducible risk factors are concerned to the behavioral factors such as smoking or not exercising. In the article, the screening to detect disease is based on a biomedical model, while screening for the risk factors is based on a general susceptibility model. As the two different types of program can differ in goals, procedures and outcomes, an examination of these differences highlighted the importance of health education in screening for behavioral risk factors, especially those which predict cardiovascular diseases.

In four experiments subjects remembered the critical information in a traumatic slide as either more focused spatially than in its original presentation or more focused spatially than information in a matched neutral slide. Subjects comprehend a neutral scene by automatically extending its boundaries and understanding the visual information in a broader external context. However, when subjects are negatively aroused by a scene, they process more elaborately those critical details that were the source of the emotional arousal, and they maintain or restrict the scene's boundaries. ‘Tunnel memory’ results from this greater elaboration of critical details and more focused boundaries. Tunnel memory may explain the superior recognition and recall of central, emotion-arousing details in a traumatic event, as shown in previous research on emotion and memory. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After seeing Milgram's Obedience film, students apparently conclude that people are evil and would harm a stranger if given the opportunity. Students overestimate the shock level which subjects deliver when uncoerced by the experimenter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study investigated retrospective evaluations of past emotional states. Twenty-nine graduate students rated their anxiety one day prior to their comprehensive examination. Approximately 1 month later, they attempted to recall their pre-exam anxiety ratings. Half the students recalled after being informed that they had passed the exam, while the others recalled while still awaiting a decision. Students as a whole, but especially those who knew they had passed, recalled being more anxious than what they had reported initially. Thus one's recollection of a prior emotional state may be influenced by one's current emotional state. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]