Emotions and memories

A University of Leicester psychologist has been involved in new research with Cornell University professors which has shown that emotions, particularly those provoked by negative events, can trigger inaccurate memories – and the effect is worse, not better, when the witness is an adult rather than a young child.

In an international collaboration of researchers, Dr Robyn Holliday, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Leicester, and professors from the United States collected data from 7 and 11 year old children and young adults.

The findings have recently been published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 107, 137-154.

They contradict prevailing legal and psychological thinking and have implications for the criminal justice system, said human development professors at Cornell, Valerie Reyna and Charles Brainerd.

The Cornell researchers, who also co-authored the 2005 book “The Science of False Memory,” previously demonstrated that adults attach far more meaning to events than children do.

Now, working with Robyn Holliday at the University of Leicester and colleagues at the University of North Florida, the pair conducted experiments at Cornell’s Memory and Neuroscience Laboratory. The works shows that experiences that stimulate negative emotions are very bad for the accuracy of children’s memories, but even worse for the accuracy of adults.

“We found something different from what leading theories of emotional memory in adults say,” Charles Brainerd said. “By manipulating the emotional content of word lists, we found that materials that had negative emotional content in fact produced the highest levels of false memory.”

Children ages 7 and 11, and young adults ages 18 to 23, were shown lists of closely related emotional words – such as “pain,” “cut,” “ouch,” “cry” and “injury.” In each list some related words – such as “hurt” – were left out. When asked to recognize words from the list, respondents would often mistakenly remember “hurt” as one of the words. These mistakes allowed researchers to determine the level of emotion-induced false memory at each age.

The legal implications of the findings are profound.

“In the great preponderance of legal cases, the only evidence that’s determinative is what people say happened,” said Brainerd, who directs Cornell’s psychology and law program.

“That’s it. So the question of the conditions under which your memory of events is distorted is the most fundamental question about the reliability of evidence – because it is most of the evidence.”

Brainerd continued. “In the law, you’re dealing with events that are emotional. So the question of whether or not the emotional content of experiences that you’re trying to remember screws up your memory is a really big question.”

“This is especially important for legal cases in which the victim or witness is a child”, says Holliday. Children are viewed by the courts as vulnerable witnesses. In the UK there are specific interviewing guidelines that must be followed when interviewing that those involved in legal cases with children when investigating crimes involving children.”

The National Science Foundation supported this research.

Source: University of Leicester Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 107, 137-154