Elizabeth F. Loftus is an American psychologist who is best known in relation to the misinformation effect, false memory and criticism of recovered memory therapies.
The "lost in the mall" technique or experiment is a memory implantation technique used to demonstrate that confabulations about events that never took place – such as having been lost in a shopping mall as a child – can be created through suggestions made to experimental subjects that their older relative was present at the time. It was first developed by Elizabeth Loftus and her undergraduate student Jim Coan, as support for the thesis that it is possible to implant entirely false memories in people. The technique was developed in the context of the debate about the existence of repressed memories and false memory syndrome.
Susan A. Clancy is a cognitive psychologist and associate professor in Consumer behaviour at INCAE as well as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University. She is best known for her controversial work on repressed and recovered memories in her books Abducted and The Trauma Myth.
A false confession is an admission of guilt for a crime which the individual did not commit. Although such confessions seem counterintuitive, they can be made voluntarily, perhaps to protect a third party, or induced through coercive interrogation techniques. When some degree of coercion is involved, studies have found that subjects with highly sophisticated intelligence or manipulated by their so-called "friends" are more likely to make such confessions. Young people are particularly vulnerable to confessing, especially when stressed, tired, or traumatized, and have a significantly higher rate of false confessions than adults. Hundreds of innocent people have been convicted, imprisoned, and sometimes sentenced to death after confessing to crimes they did not commit—but years later, have been exonerated. It was not until several shocking false confession cases were publicized in the late 1980s, combined with the introduction of DNA evidence, that the extent of wrongful convictions began to emerge—and how often false confessions played a role in these.
Recovered-memory therapy (RMT) is a catch-all term for a controversial and scientifically discredited form of psychotherapy that critics say utilizes one or more unproven therapeutic techniques to purportedly help patients recall previously forgotten memories. Proponents of recovered memory therapy claim, contrary to evidence, that traumatic memories can be buried in the subconscious and thereby affect current behavior, and that these memories can be recovered through the use of RMT techniques. RMT is not recommended by professional mental health associations. RMT can result in patients developing false memories of sexual abuse from their childhood and events such as alien abduction which had not actually occurred.
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 psychology, a false memory is a phenomenon where someone recalls something that did not actually happen or recalls it differently from the way it actually happened. Suggestibility, activation of associated information, the incorporation of misinformation, and source misattribution have been suggested to be several mechanisms underlying a variety of types of false memory.
Saul Kassin is an American academic, who serves as a professor of psychology at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Massachusetts Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Jennifer Joy Freyd is an American psychologist, researcher, author, educator, and speaker. Freyd is an extensively published scholar who is best known for her theories of betrayal trauma, DARVO, institutional betrayal, and institutional courage.
The misinformation effect occurs when a person's recall of episodic memories becomes less accurate because of post-event information. The misinformation effect has been studied since the mid-1970s. Elizabeth Loftus is one of the most influential researchers in the field. One theory is that original information and the misleading information that was presented after the fact become blended together. Another theory is that the misleading information overwrites the original information. Scientists suggest that because the misleading information is the most recent, it is more easily retrieved.
Memory implantation is a technique used in cognitive psychology to investigate human memory. In memory implantation studies researchers make people believe that they remember an event that actually never happened. The false memories that have been successfully implanted in people's memories include remembering being lost in a mall as a child, taking a hot air balloon ride, and putting slime in a teacher's desk in primary school.
Imagination inflation is a type of memory distortion that occurs when imagining an event that never happened increases confidence in the memory of the event.
The replication crisis is an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method, such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially call into question substantial parts of scientific knowledge.
Sofie Hagen is a London-based Danish comedian, author, podcaster, fashion designer, and fat acceptance campaigner. She has toured with comedy shows, released a book and hosted and co-hosted a number of podcasts.
Julia Rucklidge is a Canadian-born clinical psychologist who is the director of the Mental Health and Nutrition Research Group at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Her research has centered on mental health and nutrition.
The Confession Tapes is a true crime television documentary series that presents several cases of possible false confessions leading to murder convictions of the featured people. In each case, the documentary presents alternate views of how the crime could have taken place and features experts on false confessions, criminal law, miscarriages of justice and psychology. The series, produced and distributed by Netflix, became available to all Netflix subscribers on September 8, 2017. Critics praised the series, likening it to other Netflix true crime documentaries, such as The Keepers and Making a Murderer.
Maryanne Connell-Covello Garry is a New Zealand educational psychology academic. As of mid-2018, she is a full professor at the University of Waikato. Garry is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.
Tania Israel is an American psychologist and professor in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Her research focuses on the development and implementation of interventions to support the mental health and well-being of LGBTQ individuals and communities. Israel has presented about dialogue across political lines and is the author of Beyond Your Bubble: How to Connect Across the Political Divide, Skills and Strategies for Conversations That Work and Facing the Fracture: How to Navigate the Challenges of Living in a Divided Nation. She is also known for writing song lyrics, memoir, and bisexual haiku.
Aikaterini Fotopoulou is a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist who is a professor at the University College London Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology. She is the co-founder and Treasurer of the International Association for the Study of Affective Touch and the President-Elect of the European Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Society. She is also a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and past co-chair of its International Convention, and the past President of the Psychology Section of the British Science Association. Fotopoulou was the past Director of the London Neuropsychoanalysis Centre, Secretary of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society and coordinator of the London Neuropsychoanalysis Group.
Thema Simone Bryant, also known as Thema Bryant-Davis, is an American psychologist who is a professor of psychology at the Pepperdine University, where she directs the Culture and Trauma Research Laboratory. Her research considers interpersonal trauma and societal trauma of oppression. She was elected as the 2023 President of the American Psychological Association.
