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Steve Penrod is a distinguished professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His education and career have led him to become an expert in the areas of psychology and law. He has contributed heavily to the field of psychology in the area of eyewitness memory, specifically the accuracy of eyewitness identification.
Penrod received his B.A. in political science at Yale College in 1969, where he was involved with the Yale Political Union. Penrod studied at Harvard Law School and received his J.D. in 1974. In 1979, he received a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard. His dissertation was titled, Evaluation of social scientific and traditional attorney methods of jury selection.
From 1971 to 1973, Penrod worked as a Legal Officer in the Judge Advocate General's Corps, U.S. Navy. In 1979, he became a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin. In 1989, Penrod became a professor of law and an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. In 1995 Penrod moved to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where he was a professor of psychology and law and the program director for the law and psychology programs. In 2001 Penrod became a distinguished professor of psychology at John Jay.
Most of Penrod's work has dealt with eyewitness studies. In one of his most commonly cited articles (according to Harzing), "Eyewitness Identification Procedures: Recommendations for Lineups and Photospreads," he discusses the topic of eyewitness identification and recommends different techniques to help lower the chances of false identification. Examples of these include double-blind lineups, informing witnesses that the suspect may not even be present in the lineup, and choosing distractors carefully based on the witness's verbal description.
Another Penrod study, "Meta-analysis of facial identification studies" focuses on discovering what variables influence facial identification performance and what aspects of this topic should be further studied. Some variables that were found to affect performance were context reinstatement, target distinctiveness, elaboration at encoding, exposure time, cross-racial identification, and retention interval.
Penrod also did a study, "Choosing, confidence, and accuracy: A meta-analysis of the confidence-accuracy relation in eyewitness identification studies," which deals with confidence of eyewitnesses. This study sought to discover the strength of correlation between confidence and accuracy for eyewitness identifying a suspect. It found that those who identified the correct suspect tended to have higher confidence levels than those who were incorrect.
In law, a witness is someone who has knowledge about a matter, whether they have sensed it or are testifying on another witnesses' behalf. In law a witness is someone who, either voluntarily or under compulsion, provides testimonial evidence, either oral or written, of what they know or claim to know.
Together, legal psychology and forensic psychology form the field more generally recognized as "psychology and law". Following earlier efforts by psychologists to address legal issues, psychology and law became a field of study in the 1960s as part of an effort to enhance justice, though that originating concern has lessened over time. The multidisciplinary American Psychological Association's Division 41, the American Psychology-Law Society, is active with the goal of promoting the contributions of psychology to the understanding of law and legal systems through research, as well as providing education to psychologists in legal issues and providing education to legal personnel on psychological issues. Further, its mandate is to inform the psychological and legal communities and the public at large of current research, educational, and service in the area of psychology and law. There are similar societies in Britain and Europe.
A police lineup or identity parade is a process by which a crime victim or witness's putative identification of a suspect is confirmed to a level that can count as evidence at trial.
Lisa Feldman Barrett is a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where she focuses on affective science. She is a director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory. Along with James Russell, she is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion Review. Along with James Gross, she founded the Society for Affective Science.
David Ian Perrett FBA FRSE is a professor of psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where he leads the Perception Lab. The main focus in his team's research is on face perception, including facial cues to health, effects of physiological conditions on facial appearance, and facial preferences in social settings such as trust games and mate choice. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed articles, many of which appearing in leading scientific journals such as the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B - Biological Sciences, Psychological Science, and Nature.
Kathy Pezdek is Professor and Associate Dean of the School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences (SBOS), Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. Dr. Pezdek is a cognitive psychologist specializing in the study of eyewitness memory. She frequently serves as an expert witness in the area of eyewitness identification and has testified on this topic in Federal, State and Superior Court cases. Her extensive research has focused on a range of topics related to Law and Psychology that apply to both adults and children. These topics include face memory, false memory, suggestibility of memory, lineup techniques, and detecting deception. Kathy Pezdek is a Fellow of the American Psychological Society, has served as Editor of Applied Cognitive Psychology and is currently on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Applied Psychology and Legal and Criminological Psychology.
In eyewitness identification, in criminal law, evidence is received from a witness "who has actually seen an event and can so testify in court".
The cross-race effect is the tendency to more easily recognize faces that belong to one's own racial group. In social psychology, the cross-race effect is described as the "ingroup advantage," whereas in other fields, the effect can be seen as a specific form of the "ingroup advantage" since it is only applied in interracial or inter-ethnic situations. The cross-race effect is thought to contribute to difficulties in cross-race identification, as well as implicit racial bias.
Saul Kassin is a distinguished professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice - City University of New York and Massachusetts Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Phoebe C. Ellsworth is an American social psychologist and professor at the University of Michigan, holding dual appointments at the Psychology Department and in the Law School.
Eyewitness testimony is the account a bystander or victim gives in the courtroom, describing what that person observed that occurred during the specific incident under investigation. Ideally this recollection of events is detailed; however, this is not always the case. This recollection is used as evidence to show what happened from a witness' point of view. Memory recall has been considered a credible source in the past, but has recently come under attack as forensics can now support psychologists in their claim that memories and individual perceptions can be unreliable, manipulated, and biased. As a result of this, many countries, and states within the United States, are now attempting to make changes in how eyewitness testimony is presented in court. Eyewitness testimony is a specialized focus within cognitive psychology.
Psychology, Public Policy, and Law is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Psychological Association. It publishes original empirical papers, reviews, and meta-analyses on the contribution of psychological science to law and public policy.
Eyewitness memory is a person's episodic memory for a crime or other witnessed dramatic event. Eyewitness testimony is often relied upon in the judicial system. It can also refer to an individual's memory for a face, where they are required to remember the face of their perpetrator, for example. However, the accuracy of eyewitness memories is sometimes questioned because there are many factors that can act during encoding and retrieval of the witnessed event which may adversely affect the creation and maintenance of the memory for the event. Experts have found evidence to suggest that eyewitness memory is fallible.
Gail S. Goodman is an American psychologist, known as one of the first in her field to study children's roles in the legal system, specifically children's eyewitness testimony pertaining to the Sixth Amendment. Her awards for her contributions to research, writing, and teaching include the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest in 2017. Her involvement includes being cited in United States Supreme Court cases, which is rare for psychologists.
Roderick Cameron Lodge Lindsay is a Canadian psychologist who studies the area of psychology and law, and focuses on eyewitness memory. In 1974, he received his bachelor's degree at the University of Toronto and in 1978 he received his master's degree from the University of Alberta. Lindsay also received his Ph. D from the University of Alberta in 1982.
Gary L. Wells is an American psychologist and an internationally recognized pioneer and scholar in eyewitness memory research. Wells is a professor at Iowa State University with a research interest in the integration of both cognitive psychology and social psychology and its interface with law. He has extensive research on lineup procedures and the reliability and accuracy of eyewitness identification, and has been widely acknowledged in both the field of psychology and the criminal justice system. Wells has received many awards and honorary degrees and been widely recognized for his work and contributions to psychology and the implications his research has made to the legal system.
John Donald Read is a Canadian psychologist and is currently employed as professor of psychology and chair of the psychology department at Simon Fraser University in Canada. He works primarily in the field of Law and Forensics and has conducted research in the fields of human memory, eyewitness memory and the legal system.
D. Stephen Lindsay is a cognitive psychologist in the field of memory, and a professor of psychology at the University of Victoria (UVic), British Columbia. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 1987.
Verbal overshadowing is a phenomenon where giving a verbal description of sensory input impairs formation of memories of that input. This was first reported by Schooler and Engstler-Schooler (1990) where it was shown that the effects can be observed across multiple domains of cognition which are known to rely on non-verbal knowledge and perceptual expertise. One example of this is memory, which has been known to be influenced by language. Seminal work by Carmichael and collaborators (1932) demonstrated that when verbal labels are connected to non-verbal forms during an individual's encoding process, it could potentially bias the way those forms are reproduced. Because of this, memory performance relying on reportable aspects of memory that encode visual forms should be vulnerable to the effects of verbalization.
Face space is a theoretical idea in psychology such that it is a multidimensional space in which recognizable faces are stored. The representation of faces within this space are according to invariant features of the face itself. However, recently it was theoretically demonstrated that faces can be stored in the face space according to their dynamic features as well, and that in this case the resulting space exhibits a twofold structure.