Eyewitness And Emotions Paper

Eyewitness and Emotions Eyewitness information is necessary for people to know when a crime has occurred, it is especially important to people who are in the criminal justice system (Jennifer Beaudry., et la, 2013). One factor that could possibly affect the reliability of the testimony is the emotional experience that the witness had. Eyewitness often have a difficult time recalling what the person looks like who has committed the time. Researchers have questioned whether or not the negative emotion from the event has contributed to the person lack of ability to describe the person. Based off these emotional experiences, Kate Houstin, Brian Clifford, Louise Phillips & Amina Memon (2013), conducted an experiment to determine if negative emotions affect the quantity of information participants have been giving to the researcher when asked to recall what
happened during the crime. The results of the experiment concluded that participants who were involved in the emotion group gave more details about the perpetrator. However, the accuracy of the information was not different between the emotion and neutral group.
Eyewitness and Memory Eyewitness memory is often considered fallible. Some factors that can lead to eyewitness memory becoming fallible are post-event information and suggestive questioning (Odinot, Wolters & Giezen, 2012). These factors are known to be called the misinformation effect. The time when a person is interviewed to relay what happened during the crime has also been a known factor that contributes to the information not being completely accurate. Memory is known to decay as time goes by which results in the eyewitness giving more general details compared to specific facts that could have been said if the witness was asked sooner. With the fact of memory decaying being known, researchers have studied if having witness testify earlier would increase the accuracy of the information (Wang, Paterson & Kemp, 2013).
Geralda Odinot, Gezinus Wolters & Anne van Giezen (2012), study had participants watch a video of a complex event and had the participants recall details that happened during the event multiple times during a short span of time. The results of the study showed that participants did not have a problem with recalling the event long after watching the video, however, the participants showed a decrease in the amount of questions answered correctly compared to a sooner recall session. The within-subject, participants who were ask the questions multiple times, did not have an increase in correct responses from the multiple replies. The repeated questions consolidated the memory of what the participants told the researcher in previous sessions.
Eyewitness and Face Recognition
Face recognition is often considered to be a holistic process, which means that people will remember specific facial features more accurate after the individual sees a complete face (Frowd., et la, 2012). A technique for face recognition is a sequential or simultaneous line- up which police in United States often use. The way the line-up is done can affect the person’s perception when identifying a criminal. The administrator can also influence the person’s decision on which he or she believed caused the crime (Jennifer Beaudry et al, 2013). Eyewitness memory is often done in laboratories and most of the participants have never witness a real crime.
One study tested only male active duty military personnel on his ability to identify a person accurately. The participants went through two phases, one was called didactic and the second was called experiential. The didactic phase helped the participants prepare for the second phase. The second phase had the participants confined in a mock prisoner of war camp, which involved the participants being in isolation, and interrogated. The participants took the Weschler Face Test to determine the accuracy of his face recognition abilities. The results of this test showed that some of the participants could not identify the perpetrator who interrogated them, but most of the participants were able to successfully identify the correct person. The participant’ performance on the face test was associated with how well the person was able to identify the perpetrator earlier. There were more true positive responses and less false negative responses for the people that scored accurately on identifying the
witness.