Forensic Psychology

Question 1

When was forensic psychology recognised by APA

Answer 1

2001

Question 2

How rapidly growing is the pbs forensic department

Answer 2

1977 = 105 members 
2008 = 1996 members

Question 3

Examples of forensic psychology

Answer 3

Working within court
Working within organisations
Working with offenders
Working with victims

Question 4

What is the clinical role of a psychologist in court?

Answer 4

Assessing whether people are fit to stand trial through clinical interviews

Question 5

What is an issue with the ways of assessing whether someone is fit to stand?

Answer 5

There is a standard set of measurements to determine whether people are fit to stand trial or not but they are performed by different psychologists each with their own take on manuals etc.
It is almost impossible to standardise testing

Question 6

What are the general clinical problems that clinical psychologists in court may face?

Answer 6

Different methods of assessing mental illness are flawed in various ways

• thoughts of stigma
• social and cultural norms
• maladaptivity, impairment and distress

Question 7

What is the role of an actuarial psychologist in court?

Answer 7

Presents evidence on the probability of events occurring in court

Question 8

What is the role of an experimental psychologist in court?

Answer 8

Conducts an experiment that is directly related to the case in order to present evidence for or against a case

Question 9

Loftus and Palmer, 1974

Answer 9

found that when people watched a video of a car crash and were asked the speed of the cars when they ‘contacted’ ppts. estimated 30mph whereas when the word ‘smashed’ was used they estimated 40mph
they then did a follow up study and found that people were more likely to report seeing broken glass when the word smashed had been used.

Question 10

Weinberg, 1983

Answer 10

found that it was not just the answers to questions that changed but the actual memory itself was altered by misleading information.

Question 11

Yuille and Cutshall, 1986

Answer 11

studied a real life armed robbery and found that witnesses were 80% accurate 3 months later. although the inaccuracies were mainly on important things such as weight, height and age of people.
they also found that people who reported higher levels of anxiety had worse recall on average than those with lower anxiety levels

Question 12

Bruce and Young, 1998

Answer 12

found that people were good at recognising familiar faces in different contexts and were 90% accurate at recognising unfamiliar faces as long as the lighting, angle and context were not significantly different

Question 13

Messer and Brigham, 2001

Answer 13

found that people were much worse at identifying unfamiliar faces of a different race to their own.

Question 14

Loftus et al., 1987

Answer 14

found that recall dropped to just 20% accuracy when a weapon was present

Question 15

Fawcett et al., 2014

Answer 15

argued that it was not weapon focus but unexpectedness, the same levels of recall were found for a gun in a tennis court and a tennis racket in a gun range

Question 16

Valentine and Mesout, 2009

Answer 16

found that participants who reported high levels of anxiety in the London dungeon had worse recall of details than those who reported lower levels of anxiety

Question 17

Geiselman, 1985

Answer 17

developed the cognitive interview

Question 18

Fisher, 1987

Answer 18

developed the enhanced cognitive interview

Question 19

what is one main issue with research into EWT?

Answer 19

all the studies except Yuille and Cutshall are done in artificial situations where anxiety and other factors are not taken into account. this means that research lacks external validity

Question 20

what are some issues with the Yuille and Cutshall study?

Answer 20

• it does not take into account the possible impact of post-event discussion which alters memory
• low internal validity

Question 21

Peterson and Kemp, 2006

Answer 21

found that co-witness discussion, especially when communicated indirectly via news or social media had a more significant impact on the amount of false information given than any other form of misleading information

Question 22

Wentura, 2002

Answer 22

the effects of misleading information - especially post-event discussion, were negatively correlated with working memory capacity so there are large individual differences in the effects of misleading information

Question 23

Ioannou (2017)

Answer 23

found that EWT was the main form of evidence in 20% of criminal investigations and that 75% of false convictions were due to false EWT.

Question 24

Kohnken et al., 2008

Answer 24

found that the CI produced an effect size of .96 for correct information
also found a .28 increase in incorrect information from the standard interview
no difference between the two in terms of overall accuracy rates

Question 25

Memon et al., 1993

Answer 25

found that the CI was effective with children (which is good as it was also found that they are particularly susceptible to misleading information) and provides more accurate information about locations of people and objects

Question 26

Vollano and Compo, 2011

Answer 26

found that building rapport in the ECI increased the accuracy of information given

Question 27

Leo, 2009

Answer 27

found that when people seemed anxious or stressed they were more likely to be thought of as guilty by police and were therefore more likely to give a false confession. the ECI builds rapport and relaxes the interviewee so false confessions are less likely

Question 28

Vrij et al., 2010

Answer 28

found that people who were lying had a greater cognitive load than those telling the truth and so by using components of the CI such as reversing the order or changing perspective they were more likely to make mistakes due to cognitive overload whereas people telling the truth would not as they have a lower cognitive load

Question 29

what is a problem with the CI and ECI?

Answer 29

• it takes a lot more time to conduct a cognitive interview than a standard interview
• it requires more specialist training than the standard interview
• this means that police officers are often not trained in the full process as it is too expensive

Question 30

Levi, 2002

Answer 30

found that increasing the size of a line up does nothing to increase its accuracy

Question 31

Cabeza et al., 1999

Answer 31

found that when people were presented with photographs of suspects, they tended to create a prototype average from these photos and change their memory of the event to this.

Question 32

Doob and Kirschenbaum, 1973

Answer 32

created the ‘mock witness paradigm’ to test whether there is bias in a lineup. mock witnesses listen to a verbal description of the suspect and pick someone out of the lineup. each person in the lineup should be picked an equal amount of times by people who had not seen the actual person.

Question 33

Wright, 2008

Answer 33

found that 60% of witnesses to real crimes in the UK discussed both ‘crime scene details’ and ‘suspect details’ with co-witnesses

Question 34

Peterson and Kemp, 2011

Answer 34

surveyed police officers and found that the majority were aware that co-witness discussion had negative impacts on the accuracy of EWT but also reported that they were often unable to stop co-witness discussion from occurring.

Question 35

four parts of the cognitive interview

Answer 35

• report everything
• reverse the order
• reinstate the context
• change perspective

Question 36

what does the ECI add to the CI

Answer 36

Rapport building between interviewer and interviewee