Elizabeth Loftus is arguably one of the most important scientists in the area of memory evidece and false memories.
Learn as much as you can about her, her research, and how it applies to the law. Googling loftus memory will give you a good start. Your textbook also has a lot of information about her.
What did you learn? What were you must surprised about? Which of her research findings did you find most fascinating? Why do you think her research has been controversial? Does it deserve to be? How has her work helped us understand memory in general, and memory evidence in particular?
When first researching Elizabeth Loftus, I wanted to see what type of information our textbook had to offer us. The first mention of her is when they speak of her study which demonstrated how eyewitness recall could be altered by simple changes in the wording of questions. Such examples of these questions include: estimate the speed of car when it "turned right" or estimate the speed of car when it "ran the stop sign". Another question was: "Did you see THE broken headlight?" as opposed to "Did you see A broken headlight?" Simple word changes in wording such as these can be extremely misleading and they caused "substantial changes in memory". It surprised me that such simple word changes could have such a significant effect on how people judged the scene. However, it does make sense. It also is a scary thought because police can easily make a witness state what they want without the witness even knowing.
Some more information on Elizabeth Loftus that I found in my textbook was that of implanting false memories. The research came about from the recovered memory debate. Loftus wanted to test whether false memories could be implanted into a person's psyche. Unable to implant a traumatic sexual abuse memory, Loftus used a more subtle memory of being lost in the mall. Before asking participants, she made sure that these people never experienced being lost in a mall by interviewing their closest relatives. The participants were asked about being lost in the mall twice, that they were 5 years old, that they cried, that they were rescued by an elderly woman, and reunited with family. After these questions were administered, 25% of people came to "remember" most or all of the implanted memory of being lost in the mall.
The study discussed above was done in order to show that in many cases of child abuse, one needs to be careful when trying to report "recovered memories". Many times, a person is led to believe they were abused because when seeking help, therapists can coerce the patient into believing they were abused, and the patient could readily accept it. Also, there was no scientific evidence supporting the repressed memory theory, so instead of people getting better, they would in turn become worse for they believed they had experienced sexual trauma. This research I found to be rather fascinating because it calls into question how easily manipulated people can become. Her findings are actually quiet sad. It is terrible to think that someone could actually believe they were sexually abused when in reality they weren't. I want to know more about the types of questions that can be asked that wouldn't lead a person to believe they were sexually abused, but to actually know and assert that they were.
Loftus work can be considered controversial because it calls into question people's creditability. Though this has not been her intention, many may feel that her work favors the defense because she calls into question people's ability to remember. I do not feel that this is what her work is intended to do. I also do not think her work should be as controversial as it. This is because she is not trying to degrade victims, she is trying to say that many times people are coerced into believing or "remembering" one thing, when they really don't. She is trying to improve eyewitness testimony while also trying to bring about reform when it comes to investigation questioning. This is to better our society and who should be and shouldn't be convicted.
When doing some more research I realized that her work is more controversial than one may think. She actually been sued on several occasions and have faced accusations of ethical violations. Here are the links that provide this information:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/10075839/The-Alleged-Ethical-Violations-of-Elizabeth-Loftus-in-the-Case-of-Jane-Doe
http://www.astraeasweb.net/politics/loftus.html
Her work has helped us understand that not everything that is said should be believed without some sort of questioning. For example, when an eyewitness is being questioned, one should ask how they were questioned. Did the police give any subtle clues that may have led the person to believe and say they saw something that didn't exist. Her research supports this statement by showing subtle clues and word changing can be of heavy influence. This is why police should be careful when interviewing and also, in cases of sexual abuse, the source of the person's statement must be found. By this I mean, did the person report the sexual abuse on their own or was it after being seen by a therapist and the notion was "implanted" in their head.
Elizabeth Loftus is currently a psychology professor at the University of Washington. She earned her Ph.D in 1970 at Stanford and has contributed much research and theory about memory, specifically the malleability and reliability of repressed memories. Loftus questions the accuracy of repressed memories that suddenly resurface. Loftus uses the term “memory work” to describe the process of remembering repressed memories through things like dream work, hypnosis, visualization, group therapy, and suggestion by a therapist. Loftus believes that some of these retrieved “memories” are not real and that the events remembered may have actually never happened. She theorizes that these memories are falsely constructed or created through these “memory work” processes and they are truly believed by the victim. Harsh criticisms have been made about Loftus’ theory, saying that “there is no controlled scientific experiment to prove that repressed memories actually exist”. I think this is a valid point. I mean, it is scary to think that we could truly believe something so horrific happened to us, when in reality it was just false memories that we believed to be reality. It would not be ethical to do a scientific experiment on repressed memories such as these; however, because you cannot ethically implant false memories of such a terrible extent into people’s minds. http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/loftus.htm
Something VERY interesting that I read about Elizabeth was that her mother drowned in a pool when she was 14 years old. Thirty years after this her uncle told her that she was the first to find her mother. After this, memories and pictures began to come back to her vividly. However, later her uncle told her that he had made a mistake and that her aunt was really the person who first found her mother. This supports her theory that memories are fragile and can be influenced by many factors. Loftus did a “lost in the shopping mall study” which questioned teenagers about when they were lost in the mall as a child. Even though this never happened to them, they had “memories” of the event. Her research shows that false events, like the lost in the mall event, can become a reality in the person’s mind. Her research also says that memories cannot date back to before age 3. She says that any memory before age three is probably just filling in the blanks of what most likely happened. In this article it discusses the case of George Franklin who was accused by his daughter of killing her best friend, 20 years after the murder occurred. Eileen, the daughter, had vivid memories of her dad killing her friend but not until 20 years later. However, her testimony didn’t match up exactly with the facts and details of the crime, so Loftus testified at the trial and provided her research findings and explained how Eileen had mistaken memory.
One disturbing thing I read about while researching Loftus was a story about Nadean Cool, who was seeking therapy to help her cope with a traumatic event that her daughter had experienced. During therapy she underwent hypnosis and other suggestive techniques to reveal buried memories of her own alleged personal abuse as a child. Her repressed memories included being in a satanic cult, eating babies, being raped, having sex with animals, and being forced to watch the murder of her 8 year old friend! When I read this I could not believe how insane and terrible these “memories” were. How could any psychiatrist think that uncovering these things would HELP the patient? Did her doctor really believe that these were true memories? Cool received a settlement of 2.4 million dollars for the malpractice of her therapist. Another experiment done by Loftus deals with the “misinformation effect” which occurs when people who witness an event are later exposed to new and misleading information, their later recollection of the event is distorted. The study involved participants viewing a simulated car accident at an intersection with a stop sign. After viewing it ½ the participants received the suggestion that the sign was a yield sign. When they were asked later what sign they remember seeing, the ones who received the suggestion of the yield sign reported seeing a yield sign. The ones who didn’t get the suggestion were much more accurate in recalling that it was a stop sign. http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm This article, written by Loftus, discusses the “imagination inflation” which is when participants are asked to imagine a childhood event that never happened, their confidence that the event actually occurred increases. Imagination makes events seem more familiar which mistakenly leads them to believe they are memories. Loftus also talks about how innocent people confess to things they didn’t do. An experiment was done on this and results found that the innocent person initially denied the charge, but when someone said that they saw them do it, many participants “signed a confession, internalized guilt for the act, and went on to confabulate details that were consistent with the belief”. This is important for the law because many people do confess to crimes they didn’t commit, and by understanding this concept we can possibly avoid false confessions.
There can be controversy with Loftus’ theory because it could imply that all memories that arise after suggestion are false. However, this is not what she is saying. Experimental work in this area does give doubt about the validity of long-buried memories, but it does not disprove them. I think that her research is particularly important for law because many innocent people have gone to prison based on these alleged memories that turn out later to be implanted and false. This research has brought significant attention to memory evidence. I think it should work to make law professionals and jurors cautious about witness testimonies; especially when they involve repressed memories that supposedly happened 20 or 30 years prior to the trial. We need to be aware that suggestion can play a big part in the construction of memories. Police need to understand that what they say to a victim while questioning them can have a huge impact on how the victim recalls the event and the person who comitted the crime. Mental health professionals also need to be aware that how and what they say can influence their patient’s recollection of memories. I think Loftus’ work can provide important information about how to look at and evaluate repressed memories.
For this blog I ended up doing a little bit of background research on Loftus. She got her BA in math and psychology at University of California, Los Angeles then went to Stanford University to get her master’s degree and her Ph.D. both in psychology. She has been awarded a number of honors in her field, she was ranked 58th in the Review of General psychology’s top 100 most distinguished psychologist of the 20th century. She was the top ranked women of the list as well. She has six honorary doctorates for her work and research between 1982 and 2008.
One of Loftus’s most well know research studies was based around the misinformation effect, where she gave participants a video clip to watch and asked the same questions just with varying intensity of the verb. She reported that subjects who were asked how fast these cars were going when they ‘smashed’ into each other rated their speeds higher than if asked how fast were they going when they contacted one another. She inferred from her study that subjects can be influenced simply by how a verb is used when asking a question. She varied this experiment by asking if there was broken glass at the scene of the different verb categories. From this she found that more particpants recalled broken glass when in the “smashed” group compared to few participants recalling broken glass in the “contacted” group. There was no broken glass. She makes the case then that a simple change in verbs can alter the memory of witnesses making them less reliable than previously thought.
A majority of Loftus’s work was focused on memory and the influences that ideas, suggestion, leading questions and other post event information can have on a person’s memory. She further studies repressed memories, usually those related to past childhood sexual abuse. Her questions with repressed memories isn’t with whether they exist or not but how accountable are these memories and how these memories can resurface later in life. Loftus has worked with the idea of “memory work” used by therapist, where patients are encouraged to partake in hypnosis, visualization, dream works and group therapy in order to tap into their possible repressed memories. Her thoughts about this type of therapy are that the therapist may use these techniques and suggestions to develop the memory that they were sexually abused. However, these patients have created a false memory that they really believe occurred.
Loftus has had a number of critics reject her research and findings on repressed memory claiming them to be ‘inconclusive, abstract and invalid’. People also claim that she is assisting defendants win their trial and walk with no charges. Her rebuttals to these allegations are that she is helping defend those suspects who have been falsely convicted. One really interesting thing that I found was that a majority of Loftus’s criticism comes from abuse victims and their supporters. They seem to be offended by her work, which I can understand but on the other hand she is the one doing research and finding results to support her theory.
Finally Loftus’s influence on the law has been huge since releasing her research. I learned that she has testified for high profile defendants including Michael Jackson, Rodney King and the Oklahoma City bombing. She has had huge success with addressing issue with witness testimonies and their memories. She has make judges and the people of the system more aware of their witness’s reliability which some people may dispute but she is fighting for those people who have been wrongly accused. Here are some additional links that I pulled some of my information from and found to be very interesting.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/loftus.htm
http://www.vho.org/tr/2003/4/Song456-458.html
http://www.rickross.com/reference/false_memories/fsm101.html
A person's memory may not be as strong and as honest as we may have previously believed. Leading the way to prove this is Elizabeth Loftus. I have always believed that memories are memories, they are what have happened in our lives and we have experienced them. I knew that I could lose some of it, but I never realized that with the right suggestion, I could actually gain or even alter memories.
Loftus is famous for her lost in the mall study. She took several adults, ensured with her family that an event like this had never occurred, and basically inserted these memories into their head. At first they did not believe that this had actually happened, but when they were interviewed later on, they had recalled being lost in the mall when they were very young. What really surprised me, was that they would even add on to this false memory. They would insert parts that they had made up themselves into the story. Another study done on false memories involved adults recalling memories within the first year of their birth, which is practically impossible because the hippocampus is not fully developed. Many of the participants recalled a colored mobile (a memory implanted by the researches) hanging over them. Some of the participants even recalled doctors or nurses and masks and cribs. I find this so interesting because many of us know and I have even heard it pointed out that they remember nothing before a certain age, but these participants had recollections of what was going on around them many years before that.
I believe that this is so controversial because it IS a person's memory, whether it is true or not. I broke my arm was in first grade. I am one hundred percent sure of that. If my mom told me that it hadn't actually happened I would be incredibly confused and honestly would not believe her. A memory is a part of somebody and it is crazy to think that a person could implant that into another person. I do not think that this should be as controversial as it is because it is what it is. There is evidence that shows that memories are not as strong as we would like to believe and we should look at ways to ensure that this is not taken advantage of or used improperly, as in the case of Holly Ramona.
Elizabeth Loftus' research is very important and shows how fragile the memory actually is. Her research should be used in helping us discover ways to ensure that false memories are not created in patients of psychologists/psychiatrists or used in interrogations of witnesses.
Elizabeth Loftus originally planned on being a math teacher growing up, but luckily for us, she discovered psychology. She went to UCLA and graduated in 1966 with degrees in math and psychology. She went on to receive her Ph.D from Stanford and became very interested in long term memory. She taught at the University of Washington, but now is currently teaching at UC Irvine.
One of her most famous experiments has been dubbed the “lost in the mall” technique. She would give the participants four stories that were supposedly from family members. The participants didn’t know, but they all received the same false story; they were lost in a mall when they were around the age of 5 or 6. Some of the subjects were able to give details about this event that they never experienced. Surprisingly, 25% of the participants could recall at least part of being lost in a mall, even though this never happened to any of them. She concluded with this experiment it is very easy to place memories in people’s minds. She also says it is completely normal for this to happen and the people are not intentionally being deceitful. When one imagined the events enough, it became real to them and they were considered real memories. Not only can memories be placed into the minds of people, but they can also altered by how the question is asked. This phenomenon was displayed through Loftus’ experiment involving car crashes. The participants were shown a video of a car accident. Some of them would be asked a question worded a certain way and the other portion would be asked the same question worded differently. For example, some were asked how fast were the cars going when they hit each other and others were asked how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other. The more severe the verb used, the higher the participant guessed the car speed was. This is a great example how a minute detail in questioning can alter a person’s answers.
I found it very interesting her mother drowned when she was 14 and she was told she was the first person to reach her. This story came was told to her 30 years later and she began to piece together portions of the day. She was told a short time after that she actually wasn’t the first one to respond. She experienced what she spent her life researching, which is ironic.
She is a large opponent of the argument that one can repress memories of sexual abuse and recover the memory several years later. She cites the previously mentioned experiments as evidence. Loftus states if events can be so easily fabricated in a laboratory setting, they also can be easily fabricated during therapy or by suggestive family members. She does not totally discount the possibility one may recall traumatic experiences many years later, but she does doubt the accuracy in which these events will be described. She also does not think all sex abuse victims are liars, but it may appear she does. This is much of the reason her research is controversial. People who have been victims of sexual crimes, repressed the event, and then remember it vividly many years later, are upset with her findings. She has testified for in many high profile cases that the victims of sex crimes may not remember everything completely right. She has been a useful tool for the defense, which upsets victims and their advocates. Anytime someone questions the credibility of a victim of a sexual crime, it will be controversial, but her work does not deserve to be. She is just trying to do her job and find more out about memory. She may not be fighting for sexual criminals, but she also does not want to continue the trend of innocent people going to prison due to incorrect eyewitness accounts. Investigators should keep her work in mind with conducting interviews and charging suspects with crimes. Memory is not as reliable as people once thought, and that fact should always be remembered.
http://www.examiner.com/skepticism-in-national/the-ever-changing-past-elizabeth-loftus-and-memory-manipulation-research
http://www.rickross.com/reference/false_memories/fsm101.html
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/loftus.htm
http://eassurvey.wordpress.com/2008/11/15/a-brief-history-of-the-false-memory-research-of-elizabeth-loftus/
We have been discussing memory a lot in class this week and it was very fun to see all the work that Loftus has done and how it applies to things we've learned in class. First i decided to get some background information on the distinguished scholar to get a feel of where she came from. She earned her BA in mathematics (which i assume has helped her with her research) and psychology from the University of California. After that she furthered her education and earned her MA and Ph.D from Stanford University in psychology. She has been adding to the psychology field ever since by being dedicated to her research in misinformation effect and false memories. In 2002, she was 58th in the top 100 most influential researchers in psychology throughout the 20th century, making her the top rated woman on the list--quite the achievement. Now to take a look at all of her research:
She created the "lost in the mall technique" which has helped prove that false memory can be created by therapists- which is important when dealing with a case of accusations that were said to have happened much earlier in life. Loftus took several college aged students and contacted their family to make sure that none of the students had ever had a bad mall situation growing up. She then interviewed the kids one by one and told them that "she had heard about their awful mall experience when they got lost in the mall." Even though this had never happened to the students, many started creating elaborate stories about their "flashbacks" of being lost in the mall. This is a key point to keep in mind when in the court because some of the "victims" "memories" could very well have been created due to societal cues.
Another study that Loftus did was have several participants watch videos of a car crash. She then asked the participants varying questions about what had happened. She found that if she asked questions involving the words "collide" and "smashed" the participants described the video has more dangerous than is she used words such as "bumped" and contacted". This is eery to think about because cops ask witnesses several questions about what they see during a crime and it makes you wonder if witnesses answer differently due to the way the cops ask the question. Eye witness testimonies have put far too many innocent people in jail to due, unplanned, accidental false memories--many people and an average joe on the jury probably don't even know such a thing exists.
Loftus has been scrutinized for favoring the defense throughout her research. She is constantly calling into question the credibility of people and their memories.While i can understand where people are coming from when discussing Loftus' work, i do not feel that her work should be critized. She is calling into question what many people would never have even thought about and in my eyes she is working to properly carry out justice in our society. Elizabeth Loftus is a hero to many innocent people that may otherwise have been put in jail after an altered testimony.
information from wikipedia.
Elizabeth Loftus is an American psychologist known around the world for her work on human memory. In 2002, she was named one of the one hundred most influential researchers in psychology in the twentieth century. Loftus received her Ph.D from Stanford in 1970, and has since been awarded numerous honors, awards, and honorary degrees. Throughout her career Loftus has been involoved in the trials of Ted Bundy, O.J. Simpson, the Hillside stranglers, and many others. A lot of Loftus' research involves false memories. In the majority of her studies she demonstrates how easy it is for people to create what they think are actual memories from their past, when really it's just a made up story the person was told. As an assignment for her cognitive psychology class she had a student of hers make up a very basic story about his brother getting lost in a shopping mall, and then tell it to his brother. His brother was then recorded retelling the story in a very detailed manner, as if he really believed this incident had happened to him. This research, along with other studies done by Loftus, are considered controversial because they implant somewhat distressing false memories into people's minds. I'm not sure if it deserves to be considered controversial or not. On the one hand, you have historic research that has helped us understand so much about human memory, and it hasn't really hurt anyone. On the other hand, being lead to believe something disturbing about your past could be emotionally distressing, not to mention finding out that your so easily coerced probably doesn't make you feel the greatest. Another study done by Loftus, along with a few other colleagues, was a study on doctored photographs of past public events. She and the other researchers showed adults doctored photographs of past public events to determine if this would have an affect on memory for those events. They showed the Italian participants original and doctored images of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and a 2003 protest in Rome against the Iraq war, and then they answered questions about those events. The people who viewed the doctored images had very detailed false memories about the actual events; the specific aspects of the events they talked about remembering never actually happened. The researchers created false memories. This is the research finding I found the most interesting, and also the thing I found most surprising. I think it's so weird how you can alter someone's memories and get them to think something really happened, but it didn't. I want to say that that would never happen to me; no one could make me create false memories. However, I bet that's what the research participants thought too. I think this topic in particular can be applied to law and memory and eyewitness evidence. If it just takes this one study to alter the participants' memories, then what can sitting for hours in a police department, listening to investigators' leading questions do to a person's memory? It's kind of scary to think about; this is probably one of the reasons some people are falsely convicted. Loftus' research has helped us understand memory in general by showing through research that memories are not just snapshots branded into our mind that can be easily and accurately retrieved, but in fact they can become altered or new memories can be created altogether. She also provides very compellig evidence of why we should be skeptical of memory evidence because it may not be as accurate as once thought.
https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/Sacchi_Agnoli_Loftus_ACP07.pdf
http://www.slate.com/id/2256089/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus
Dr. Elizabeth Loftus is a famed expert researcher and psychologist who established herself quiet well while also being a Professor in the Psychology department at the University of Washington. She focuses her light on malleability and reliability of repressed memories which has made her a quiet prestigious cognitive psychologist of her time. Her work alone has brought her much success and has made a major contribution to psychology with the controversial aspect of psychology known as memory. She was born in Los Angeles, California in 1944 and had the goal of once becoming a math teacher but found interest in the area of Psychology while attending UCLA where she received her degree in math and psychology. She continued onto Stanford for her graduate school and took the subject of psychology and honed in on the specific aspect of long term memory. Later she would also receive her M.A. and Ph. D at the University of Washington, where she still currently is employed as a professor.
She began her trek with research designed with investigations of how the mind classifies and remembers information. She has some published work in which she states her main drive is to “I want my work to make a difference in people’s lives.” With this determination in mind Elizabeth set out to look in depth on traumatically repressed memories and eyewitness accounts. This path took her directly into stories and cases involving sexual abuse and defending accused offenders. With this forefront in the making she made her way into the courtroom to testify in over 200 trials as an expert witness on the unreliability of eyewitness testimonies based on false memories, in which she saw to be triggered, implanted, or created in the mind itself. Her core in testifying in such cases shows her hope of preventing an innocent victim from going to prison and therefore ultimately protecting a family’s unity. One of her most famed appearances came when she testified in the Ted Bundy case. With this top-notch trial under her resume she has also appeared on talk shows such as The Oprah Whinfrey Show, published 19 books, and nearly 200 articles. It is obvious she has made quiet a name for herself and is one of the most famed psychologists within the field of memory. She is currently a member of several associations based on psychological aspects and has received many awards for her work.
Through researching Elizabeth rather extensively I learned her determination in defending those accused of crimes that are based solely on memory are not necessarily always false but is in opposition to the idea that psychotherapists encourage their patients to believe they have been actual victims or how they set in stone what may be just a pigment of their imagination. She does not say that repressed memories cannot come back, but states there is no reliable way to determine if each individual in each case is expressing all of these symptoms accurately and therefore this theory cannot be accurate in the idea of all cases. She says real memories are usually more detailed where as when these false memories are present they may seem real but have been formulated through counseling and have been “hardened” to believe that they really did happen. Her quote that caught my eye the most was: “The most horrifying idea is that what we believe with all our hearts is not necessarily the truth.” With her stating this she shows that she is not out to undermine the actual accusers but get to the core of the actual long term memories themselves and admits that these people don’t lie or hide the actual truth but express these in a way that they honestly do believe it’s the truth and this may have come from extensive therapy which in a sense brought these ideas to become more real and in saying that says there is no real scientific way to show that these repressed memories can in any way be held relevant in the court of law when used as a sole indicator as to if someone committed a crime or not.
One of her research findings that I found rather fascinating was her “Shopping Mall Study.” In this study she had teenagers and children programmed to remember when they were lost in a mall as a child. While these incidents never really actually occurred, she questioned them about it, which in turn caused these subjects to have increasing vibrant memories. With this process being similar to that of traumatically repressed memories which can take the same effect by unraveling vibrant memories through extensive therapy. With the subjects eventually admitting they remembered the incident, when in fact it never happened, shows her strength in truth on how false events can actually become a reality in a person’s mind and how these individuals can confuse or combine actual occurring events with those that are dreamt or implanted to mix them into what they believe to be the actual truth. I found this most surprising in the idea that this can actually happen rather easily in numerous cases. It reminds me of the movie “Inception” where the main characters are set out to implant an idea into a subjects head who in reality will accept that idea as their own and act upon it. Like Elizabeth has shown here I found it quiet surprising that this research shows tremendous credibility for her whole cause in how memory itself is amazingly inventive and fragile. This study marks massive credibility in that subjects in eyewitness testimonies are often unreliable and that false memories can be triggered merely by suggestion or giving of incorrect post even information. In all, it raises high doubt in the validity of long buried memories.
I believe her research has been so controversial in idea that she takes all of the cases involving long term repressed memory and questions its validity. It is true that some cases may be right on cue, but others may be exactly what Elizabeth is speaking of. I find the criticism in that Elizabeth shows truth that false memories can be implanted, distorted over time, or mixed with dreams and how there is no accurate way to prove that one’s memories have been kept dormant and hidden from a person’s mind for so long and they can’t appear in a clear cut testimony as is displayed in court for that reason. Critics also see that she can show that there is no accurate proof but also question where is hers? Yes she has done numerous research but then again this research having tremendous credibility cannot be held true itself on a consistent case by case basis in that she may be right most of the time but what about the case where repression of memories is an actual truth? Personally I do not believe it should be controversial due to Elizabeth’s finding and realization that this may just be a possibility and she has established her goal on more than one occasion that this may be a viable alternative to look into deeper in the future. She has raised very many good questions through her work and I credit her 100% and tend to agree with what she has to say. She is not trying to re-write the laws and be the president of the U.S. and force this upon everyone but wants to open the eyes of the jurors and those involved who actually hear these cases and raise the idea that these memories may be in fact false due to this research and these findings and that one cannot just hear ones testimony and say “Well she was the victim and that sounds like a pretty vivid memory, it must be true!”
Her research has helped us understand memory in general to a much deeper extent in that just because someone remembers something doesn’t mean that it is the all out truth. The mind has a unique way of tying false things with real things mending a picture that one thinks is all from reality. Her research has shown that therapy may confirm these ideals and through post event information they can be exaggerated or even taken to a new level that never really even existed. In memory evidence in specific Elizabeth has taken successful leaps in that Eyewitness testimony use to be extremely credible and she now shows that although the subject honestly and truly believes the truth and follows their heart, the mind itself can convert these happenings unconsciously into making one believe that the event actually occurred when it in fact did not, which may be caused just by questioning or influence of other sources. She has taken memory evidence in the court room down off its heavens as a automatic conviction testimony to evidence that is like all other types, even physical, in that it too can be questioned and just as easily can be contaminated or distorted through handling or by processing of individual professionals who use their opinionated guesses. For example, Finger print analysis has been said to be a forensic scientist examiner and it is their personal biases and opinions that derive their conclusion and just like memories these too can be formulated. If someone goes into a therapist like that of Holly in our reading this week and says she says her father looked at her in a sexual way, the therapist labeled this “emotional molestation” and told Holly this. This would generate into Holly’s mind as a confirmation that the look was indeed crude and she was right in her past memories. So through misleading, contamination, or influence of outside sources memory evidence may to be altered and is not as credible as once believed.
Websites used:
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/loftus.htm
http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/loftus.html
While browsing through some websites and the textbook, I learned that Elizabeth Loftus has become a leading figure in cognitive psychology. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in math and psychology at UCLA in 1966. Two years later, she applied to graduate school at Stanford. During graduate school, she focused her attention and research on long term memory. Her research on long term memory, led to more research on repressed memories of eyewitnesses. Loftus believed false memories could be implanted in a person’s mind.
Loftus has published many books and numerous articles about her research findings. While reading an article about her life, I found that she was featured in Psychology Today. In the article, she stated, "I wanted my work to make a difference in people's lives." In fact, her research studies of false memories have actually saved innocent people from being prosecuted.
I learned that Loftus has also researched child sexual abuse cases. She believes these repressed memories can be retrieved with several therapeutic techniques. When reviewing a study, she found that therapists can actually play a role in developing some women’s false memories about a serious abuse or sexual harassment cases. Women with these false memories may indicate that they were actually a victim in a traumatic, sexual abuse case.
Furthering her research, Loftus designed a study called, “Lost in the Mall.” The purpose of this study was to determine if people would create a false memory about a time he/she was lost in a mall when he/she was a young child. To begin this study, Loftus found participants who had never actually gotten lost in a mall before (this information was reported by someone who knew the participant as a young child—mother, family member, etc.). Participants in this study were told a summary about when the subject was lost in the shopping mall. Each participant was asked to try to recall this memory and give further details about the event. In conclusion, Loftus found about 20% of the participants accepted these false memories, many of whom stated more details about the event he/she created in his/her mind. Therefore, this study concluded that it is possible for some people to be led to create false memories about a given event.
I thought this study was very interesting. I was actually surprised how many people actually alter their memories after hearing a summary about a traumatic event—such as being lost in a shopping mall.
In chapter 7 of the textbook, the authors state that Loftus and her colleagues determined that false memories can be persuaded to believe and create false memories just by the wording of questions. Even the littlest variation in the wording of a question can suggest and change a person’s memory of an event. Therefore, I can see how her research is considered controversial. Performing studies on person’s memories is controversial. However, I believe that the wording of a question can definitely trigger different types of responses.
Retrieving memories and information about a traumatic event can be challenging for a victim. As Loftus found, it is important for law enforcement and psychologists to avoid biased questions or information that could potentially alter the victim’s memory of the event. In general, memory is important for recollection of events that have occurred; however, Loftus’s studies showed that memory evidence can be altered with misleading information and questioning.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/loftus.htm
http://ritualabuse.us/research/memory-fms/a-brief-history-of-the-false-memory-research-of-elizabeth-loftus-2/
Elizabeth Fishman Loftu, also known as "Diva of Discloser" while searching to learn all i could learn about her,I found out that Elizabeth was born in Los Angeles, California on october 16, 1944, she is the daughter of Sidney and Rebecca Fishman. Elizabeth father was a physician and a math geek and her mother was a librarian and then became a stay home mother. When Growing up Elizabeth seemed to be a daddy's girl not because she Loved math but because she was raised by her father when her mother passed away when Elizabeth was 14 years old.I Learned that As Elizabeth Grow up she had a goal of becoming a Math teacher but as time went by she found herself studying psychology and measuring people memory with her professor Dr. Jonathan Freeman at the university of Los Angels. After Elizabeth Got Her BA For Double Majoring In Math And psychology she then begin a new journey by finding interest in studying long term memory while at Standford university for graduate school. s the year went by Elizabeth Married Geoffrey Loftu in 1968, they never had kid but they both had a career that changes the world today.
Learning about Elizabeth research seems very long because she was not a stable person. Elizabeth was not stable because of her research in the court room. Elizabeth began her research on traumatically repressed memories and eyewitness accounts and then In 1974 her research got her into courtroom testifying in many trials as an expert witness on the unreliability of eyewitness testimonies based on false memories, which she believed to be triggered, suggested, implanted, or created in the mind. I was surprised to find out that Elizabeth was only testifying because she, "hope of preventing an innocent victim from going to prison" and i was also surprised to learn that drowning was the caused of Elizabeth mothers death; which makes me wonder that her life must have been really bad.
In my textbook I learned that Elizabeth did a research of false memories which was call " Lost In Mall Study" this study was to prove that false information can be implanted in ones head no mater who you are sick or not. to prove such things can happen, i learned about a study she did a while a back where she had others watching crime videos and after it was done she asked them questions about thing that was not in the video but because she said it, they believe her and repeated it as their own memory instead of what was really in the video. I believe Elizabeth research has been controversial because these are problems that our society face everyday, and we as society needs to put a stop to it. Loftus states if events can be so easily fabricated in a laboratory setting, they also can be easily fabricated during therapy or by suggestive family members.I believe this because we must find a cure cause with out one many innocent men and women may end up died or in jail for no reason of what so ever. Elizabeth worked has helped us understand memory in general because it has now give our justice system a better knowledge on how to question witnesses and it has given us a better knowledge to to understand that not everything that is said is true, because lies can be to and it only takes one to hear that lie but at the same time does it mean that every time i say some thing some one can believe it and transmit it into their own life?, because not all memories that arise after suggestion are false, some may be true but yet for other it may be false.
https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/OCRegisterProfileCalvin11-3-02.htm
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/loftus.htm
http://socialecology.uci.edu/faculty/eloftus/
I was extremely interested in learning more about Elizabeth Loftus and her background as I have heard quite a lot about her theories and research in other psychology classes as well. Elizabeth Loftus is a highly educated; she is from Bell air California, originally wanted to be a teacher. Elizabeth Loftus completed her undergraduate degree from UCLA where her interest in psychology developed. After completing her undergraduate degree she went to pursue her Masters at Stanford University and also went forward in getting a PhD from Stanford as well. The topic in psychology which she was most interested in, was memory and went ahead in researching and making a name for her in the same field. She was mostly interested in how the mind processes and retains the information ie a person’s ability to remember information. She did a lot of research in the area of repressed memories and false memories. Her research in this topic made her come to certain conclusions mainly the possibility of the creation of false memories and a person’s myth of repressed memories. Her research in this area made her an expert witness in many cases and even made her a prominent figure in the field of law.
Elizabeth Loftus mainly come to the conclusion that
false memories can be created in a person’s mind through constant suggestions and also can be implanted in the minds of people through faulty and negligent therapy. She has also stated that it not has been proven and confirmed by any scientific experiments the existence f repressed memories.
Elizabeth Loftus has certainly made a distinct name for herself as she has been an expert witness in various popular cases such as Ted Bundy, George Franklin etc .She has also conducted various studies such as the lost in the shopping mall study in which teenagers were mad to believe through suggestions that they were lost in the mall when they were younger even though the incident dint really occur and the subjects actually reported that they had some recollection of being lost. This was a significant reasoning by her explaining the mythical repressed memories. Apart from this she has also written a lot of books on the same subject and has become one of the most famous people in the field of psychology ,a sought after speaker etc.
Even though her work has been appreciated in the society and community there are still people who criticize her work. In conclusion I think that she had a good intention behind her research which was avoiding innocent people for being convicted and avoiding friction between families. I highly respect her for the effort she has put in and her contribution to the field of psychology.
Here is a link from psychology today which has more information on Elizabeth Loftus ,her work as well as her life
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/psytoday.htm
Elizabeth Loftus is one of the world’s foremost experts on memory. She obtained her B.A. in mathematics and psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford University. She is currently a distinguished professor at the University of California, Irvine holding positions in various departments; formerly she was a professor at the University of Washington, where she taught for 29 years.
Loftus’s first significant study is one we learned about in class and our readings. The question she wanted to answer was, what happened when witnesses were questioned by police officers, and what if those questions were biased. To answer this question, she showed people a film of a traffic accident, then asked them questions about the accident. She found that when she asked questions such as how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other, that people made higher estimates of speed. As opposed to a more neutral question asking what speed were the cars at when they made contact.
In an effort to get some real life experience involving eyewitness testimony, she agreed to work with a public defender in a murder case. Following this Loftus wrote an article about her research in the case, it published in “Psychology Today” magazine. Following the release of the article, Loftus began getting calls from lawyers across the country asking for help in there cases.
The next few decades of her life were full of scientific discoveries and legal cases. Some of her research has focused on eyewitness testimony and the psychological and legal aspects. She has also done extensive research on repressed memories from childhood and the idea that these falsely recovered memories can be planted in peoples minds. One of her more famous studies showed that entirely false memories can be planted in peoples minds. She successfully made people falsely remember events from their childhood, such as getting lost in the mall.
The thing that surprised me most about Loftus was the number of high profile cases she has aided in or been an expert witness in. She has testified in hundreds of cases, with some of the more famous cases being the hillside strangler, the Mendez brothers, the Michael Jackson case, the Oklahoma City bombing case, Ted Bundy, and the Ramona case, which we read for class, along with many others.
I also found her to be surprisingly interesting I found this article/interview about her, it is from “Psychology Today” and if you have any interest in her at all, you should take a look at it, it goes into detail then anything else I have found about her.
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/psytoday.htm
I think her research findings that I found most fascinating were the ones relating to false memory. The idea that you can plant false memories in peoples minds is really interesting, and the fact that the “memories’ get more elaborate and detailed as they remember more is just crazy.
One really interesting thing relating to false memory I found in the article above. Loftus’s mother died from drowning, when Loftus was 14. On her 44th birthday, at a family gathering, an uncle informed her that she had been the one to discover her mother's dead body. Until then, she remembered little about the death itself, suddenly the memories began to drift back, clear and vivid. A few days later her brother called to say her uncle realized he'd made a mistake, that Loftus's aunt had found the body, not Loftus. Therefore, those few days of "recovered" memories were utterly false. "My own experiment had inadvertently been performed on me!" she had written. "I was left with a sense wonder at the inherent credulity of even my skeptical mind."
Loftus and her research is controversial, because the topic and the arena she is displaying it in is so controversial. The people that believe they have repressed memories, genuinely believe what they remember happened, and what they are “remembering” is one of the most horrible things that can be done to a person. So the people that don’t agree with her, firmly believe that she is setting pedophiles and rapists free. The link that I posted above shows examples of what she has to go through and deal with, relating to her controversial work. Here are a few excerpts from letters sent to her. One anonymous letter from an incest survivor concludes, "Please consider your work to be on the same level as those who deny the existence of the extermination camps during WWII." Another, from a jailed minister accused of mass child molestation, begins, "Your dedication and compassion for the innocent have earned my deepest admiration." Yet another, from a confused therapy patient, reads: "For the past two years I have done little else but try to remember. I have been told that my unconscious will release the memories in its own time and in its own way...And I need to know if I am really remembering. The guessing has become unbearable."
On one hand I think her work does need to be controversial, because we can’t just go around believing anyone that does some research on a topic, all research should be questioned. Plus it is a very controversial topic, many people are split on the issue and peoples’ lives and freedom are truly at stake. However, on the other hand I really don’t believe in the idea of memory repression. Therefore I don’t think it should be so controversial, but that is obviously a biased opinion. The idea that people can suppress such grotesque memories from their minds, particularly over a prolonged period of time, it just doesn’t add up. Especially when you factor in psychiatrists and therapists putting these memories into fragile minds.
In my research I found that Elizabeth Loftus was born on October 16, 1944 in Los Angeles, California. She received her BA in psychology and math at UCLA in 1966 and received her Ph.D at Stanford, where she became truly interested in long term memory. Loftus is currently a psychology professor at the University of Washington. She began her research on traumatically repressed memories and eyewitness accounts. According to the Psychology Today article, "the war over memory is one of the great and perturbing stories of our time, and Elizabeth Loftus, an expert on memory's malleability, stands at the highly charged center of it".
Loftus has spent most of her life researching and creating a large body of work which shows that memory is surprisingly inventive and fragile. She has done studies on more than twenty thousand subjects and many of her findings have dis-proven many peoples beliefs. She has shown that eyewitness testimony is often unreliable, that false memories can be triggered in up to twenty-five percent of individuals merely by suggestion, and that memory can be interfered with and altered by simply giving incorrect post-event information. The majority of Loftus' research focuses on repressed sexual abuse memories from childhood, that suddenly reappear in adult women often twenty years or more after the events took place. Her work raises enormous doubt about the validity of long-buried memories of trauma. http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/loftus.htm
The basic information that I gained about Elizabeth Loftus' research is that she investigates the circumstances under which information received subsequent to an accident or crime may cause predictable changes in witness' recollections of the event (Psychology History). One of the things that most surprised me in my research was the idea of "memory work". "Memory work" is the means or process of retrieving the repressed memory through invasive therapeutic techniques such as regression, dream work, hypnosis, visualization, group therapy, and suggestion by a therapist. This concept of "memory work" seems strange to me because it appears that some of these patients might not have ever even had thoughts of abuse until a therapist suggested just that, as in the case of Holly Ramona which we just studied. Also, earlier I mentioned that Loftus' studies proved that 25% of people can retrieve false memories just by suggestion, which means that there are way too many people out there believing things that in actuality are fake.
I think that Loftus' research may be considered controversial because I feel like most people would like to keep the "victim" in the role of the victim. Loftus' work seems to have taken these cases and turned them on their head and instead of believing everything that the victim says, she questions them, not because she believes they are lying, but because she seeks the truth. I don't feel that her work deserves to be controversial, all she has done is opened up another door into the human mind. Her research is just another example of something new that society has had to deal with but eventually people realize the benefits of it.
The research that Loftus has done helps us to understand memory in a more complex way. It helps us to realize just how fragile the mind can be and how easily manipulated it can also become. "The most horrifying idea is that what we believe with all out hearts is not necessarily the truth," Loftus stated in the "Diva of Disclosure" interview. This quote is a scary but eye opening one in the fact that her research has made people possibly start to wonder about memories of their own. Also, her research has brought a whole new light onto the idea of eyewitnesses. Accounts from eyewitnesses use to be thought of as solid evidence but her information has brought new evidence into the picture with the idea of false memories. Most researchers now believe that most eyewitness testimony is incorrect, because the mind can interpret things in different ways. Her research also probably impacts the way eyewitnesses are questions about incidents, because even one biased question can lead the witness to unintentionally take on an entirely new direction in their accounts of what happened.
In my research I found that Elizabeth Loftus was born on October 16, 1944 in Los Angeles, California. She received her BA in psychology and math at UCLA in 1966 and received her Ph.D at Stanford, where she became truly interested in long term memory. Loftus is currently a psychology professor at the University of Washington. She began her research on traumatically repressed memories and eyewitness accounts. According to the Psychology Today article, "the war over memory is one of the great and perturbing stories of our time, and Elizabeth Loftus, an expert on memory's malleability, stands at the highly charged center of it".
Loftus has spent most of her life researching and creating a large body of work which shows that memory is surprisingly inventive and fragile. She has done studies on more than twenty thousand subjects and many of her findings have dis-proven many peoples beliefs. She has shown that eyewitness testimony is often unreliable, that false memories can be triggered in up to twenty-five percent of individuals merely by suggestion, and that memory can be interfered with and altered by simply giving incorrect post-event information. The majority of Loftus' research focuses on repressed sexual abuse memories from childhood, that suddenly reappear in adult women often twenty years or more after the events took place. Her work raises enormous doubt about the validity of long-buried memories of trauma. http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/loftus.htm
The basic information that I gained about Elizabeth Loftus' research is that she investigates the circumstances under which information received subsequent to an accident or crime may cause predictable changes in witness' recollections of the event (Psychology History). One of the things that most surprised me in my research was the idea of "memory work". "Memory work" is the means or process of retrieving the repressed memory through invasive therapeutic techniques such as regression, dream work, hypnosis, visualization, group therapy, and suggestion by a therapist. This concept of "memory work" seems strange to me because it appears that some of these patients might not have ever even had thoughts of abuse until a therapist suggested just that, as in the case of Holly Ramona which we just studied. Also, earlier I mentioned that Loftus' studies proved that 25% of people can retrieve false memories just by suggestion, which means that there are way too many people out there believing things that in actuality are fake.
I think that Loftus' research may be considered controversial because I feel like most people would like to keep the "victim" in the role of the victim. Loftus' work seems to have taken these cases and turned them on their head and instead of believing everything that the victim says, she questions them, not because she believes they are lying, but because she seeks the truth. I don't feel that her work deserves to be controversial, all she has done is opened up another door into the human mind. Her research is just another example of something new that society has had to deal with but eventually people realize the benefits of it.
The research that Loftus has done helps us to understand memory in a more complex way. It helps us to realize just how fragile the mind can be and how easily manipulated it can also become. "The most horrifying idea is that what we believe with all out hearts is not necessarily the truth," Loftus stated in the "Diva of Disclosure" interview. This quote is a scary but eye opening one in the fact that her research has made people possibly start to wonder about memories of their own. Also, her research has brought a whole new light onto the idea of eyewitnesses. Accounts from eyewitnesses use to be thought of as solid evidence but her information has brought new evidence into the picture with the idea of false memories. Most researchers now believe that most eyewitness testimony is incorrect, because the mind can interpret things in different ways. Her research also probably impacts the way eyewitnesses are questions about incidents, because even one biased question can lead the witness to unintentionally take on an entirely new direction in their accounts of what happened.
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/psytoday.htm
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/loftus.htm
Elizabeth F. Lotus is a very well known American psychologist. She has her Ph. D in psychology and has won numerous awards. She is an expert on human memory in subjects such as the misinformation effect and the nature of false memories. Elizabeth Lotus has also written many different books about different psychology subjects and journal articles. Her main subject she focuses on is your memory and eye witnessing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus
Elizabeth is also known as “the diva of disclosure, memory researcher”. Elizabeth has done a lot of work on showing that memory is amazingly fragile and inventive. Elizabeth has done many studies on over 20,000 subjects that are classics and have toppled some very strong beliefs. Lotus has also testified in some very well known cases and has also been an expert witness in over 200 trials.
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/psytoday.htm
I found it really interesting that she was an expert witness in the Ted Bundy case. I have always found him really interesting and to take part in that case makes me really interested.
A lot of Elizabeth’s work has been controversial. I believe a lot of her work has been controversial because it has to do with your memory and expert witnessing. As we have been learning in class your brain can trick your memory easily and you can think things are different than they really are. Due to that fact first off a lot of people may not realize that. Also, doing research on that it seems easy to me that people may not believe you. It is your memory so if you think you did or didn’t do something it may be hard to make you think otherwise about it. Also doing expert witnessing can be controversial because it’s the same thing, your brain tricks your memory and you may think otherwise of what you really saw. With that being said people may not believe the research is correct. I know I did not realize how much your brain tricks you and how people miss identify people. The percentage of people that are miss identified due to eye witnessing is kind of scary to me. Until the research is shown to you which even so some may not believe it the research about memory.
It makes since to me that her work has been controversial just due to the topics. Ultimately she has so much research and is so well known I would think most people would believe her research. No matter who you are though people are going to doubt and how much research you have on it. I think she is so well known though, has won so many awards, written so many journal articles and books that she is pretty legit and I would believe her work.
Her work has helped us understand memory and memory evidence because it has helped us learn a lot more about it and understand it all better in general. She has helped us understand that you can’t believe everything you hear and you need evidence and good credibility to believe what research you read or hear.
Elizabeth Loftus has become a publically controversial person. She studied to become a math teacher and found her love of psychology at UCLA; she graduated with a BA in math and psychology. Later, Elizabeth studied at Stanford University where she received her PhD. She began teaching at the University of Washington not long after graduating. She began to research the mind and memory, specifically trauma induced memories and eyewitness accounts. Her research shows that false events can become a reality to the mind. She has also found that memories cannot date to before age three; any memory prior to this age is most likely filling in the blanks of what may have happened. Elizabeth researched false memories in a study called the "Lost In Mall Study". In this study, people began to take on the identity of, at one point, being lost in a mall as a child. Many of the participants were never lost as a child, but their false memories led them to believe they had been. She sought out to prove that false information can be placed into one’s mind. Loftus focused her career on sexual abuse stories and defending the accused offenders. She became an expert witness on the fallibility of eyewitness testimonies based on false memories. She theorized that these memories were implanted or created in the mind.
“…testifies with the hope of preventing an innocent victim from going to prison and protecting a family’s unity.” I found this quote interesting when reading one of her bios. The way this sentence is structured, it seems like she has no validity for being on trial. The word “hope” basically says that she does not work with any empirical evidence. I think this is a poorly constructed statement and that this does not portray Elizabeth Loftus’ views/research findings at all.
At 14 years old, Elizabeth mother drowned in a pool. Thirty years later her uncle told her she was the first to find her mother. She began to recall images from her mother’s death and her memory recalled that night. Later on, her uncle confessed with a mistake. He told Elizabeth that her aunt was actually the one who found her mother. This confirms all of her research which indicates that memories are malleable and may be influenced by external factors. I found this very interesting. What she must have gone through when she was younger, thinking she found her mother face down in the water.
George Franklin was accused of killing his daughter’s best friend 20 years after the murder occurred. His daughter’s memory of the killing was vivid, but not until 20 years later. One detail, her testimony did not match up with the aspects of the crime. Loftus testified on behalf of George Franklin at the trial, providing her research findings of false memories and further explained his daughter’s mistaken memory.
I do not think that her research should be as controversial as it has been. I think the media may play a large role in why she has been so controversial; they make her out for being the bad guy for letting a “monster” loose. When, in actuality, there was no “hard evidence” on the suspect at all. Elizabeth’s work is necessary in understanding the brain and what occurs during, and after, a traumatizing event. Although it may be controversial to some, I think her research has paved the way for other psychologists to create further research in understanding memory. The mind is highly misunderstood and unknown; her work brings rise to a whole new field of psychology to flourish.
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/loftus.htm
http://socialecology.uci.edu/faculty/eloftus/
Elizabeth Loftus is a renowned expert in memory. She currently is a professor at the University of California, Irvine. She has written numerous articles and books about memories, recalling memories, eyewitness testimony and the creation of false memories. Loftus is considered to be at the center of the war on memory. Loftus was mentioned in our textbook referred to as conducting the study in which one word changed in a description of a car accident can lead to people creating false memories of what really happened.
I learned a lot while researching Loftus. One website I found said that Loftus has researched more than 20,000 individuals. That seems like an incredible, extensive research base from which to make her claims. Some research she has done has shown that “eyewitness testimony is unreliable, false memories can be triggered in up to 25% of individuals by suggestion and memory can be interfered with and altered by giving incorrect post-event information.” She has been an expert witness in over 200 cases including Ted Bundy. She has also appeared on many television shows speaking about memory and eyewitness testimony. She has spoken on how repressed memories of childhood abuse, incest, etc. This has created uproar in scientific communities as people who have experience childhood trauma and had it repressed believe it really happened. Loftus believes otherwise. While I was reading I discovered that her mother drowned when Loftus was 14. Her Uncle told her that he found the body and Loftus began to remember all the details of the death and discovery. However, several days later her Uncle called and was mistaken and that her Aunt had actually discovered her mother. Loftus was shocked about her own recreation and felt her own experiment had been used on her. One study that Loftus conducted was to test the reliability of eyewitness testimony. The study showed people videos of accidents and then tested them to see what they remembered. Just by changing the questions she was asking, such as the layout and whether a car was hit or crashed into, changed what people remembered happened. This led her to see that just the power of suggestion can change what a person ‘saw’ and that eyewitness testimony isn’t really reliable.
I was very surprised at the amount of research Loftus has done. It seems like she has extensively investigated the topic and spent her whole career looking into the situation. I know that the work she has done and the publications she has written are very controversial, both in psychology and in the criminal justice system. This probably contributes to the frequency of her being called to testify as an open witness in court. For some, saying that memories are false is a radical statement. This contributes to the controversial aspect of it. Think about all those people who have accused someone of sexual abuse that they ‘remembered.’ It has significant effects for both parties involved…the accused who may not have really done the act but still have their lives and reputations ruined, and the abused, who may have mental and emotional suffering the rest of their lives. It’s something to look into. If repressed memories do really happen, then it could mean solving a lot of cold cases, but if they aren’t real, it can put a lot of innocent people in prison for a long time for no reason. If someone told me that what I was so adamant about an event that happened in my childhood never really happened, I would wonder what was wrong with me! Why did I have this memory of something that never really happened? Or happened much differently than how I remember it? I’m not saying her research needs to be controversial, but sometimes things don’t seem like a valid argument unless it is controversial. There’s always going to be people who agree and disagree, and even those who take their disagreement to an extreme. It seems to be part of research.
Loftus has really advanced the field of cognitive psychology. Her work has led to different tips for psychiatrists and therapists to counsel those who believe they have been sexually abused and have repressed the memory. It allows for the potential real facts to come out, instead of those that may have been accidentally suggested. I was amazed and very interested in her large amount of time she has spent researching, including the car accident study. I remember learning about it in my high school AP Psychology class, but had forgotten about it until researching and class. I had never really thought of it, but words have an amazing power. Changing ONE word can have a huge effect on the way people interpret and remember things. Thinking about it now, I know it has happened to me even when I’m just hanging out with my friends. Telling a story one way and then telling the same story with more sophisticated words, or from another viewpoint, can totally change how a person interprets what I meant and how they’ll remember it later. It is so crazy to think of all this and wrap your head around it! I was very interested in reading and learning about memory, encoding and the creation of false memories. Loftus’ work has truly changed how I think about memory encoding. Before I thought everything I remembered strongly was truly what happened. Now, I wonder how many events really went the way I thought they did. Her work on memory and memory evidence has helped the world to understand that you can’t always rely on what you think happened. Each person encodes differently and that eyewitness testimony should not be as relied on in court as it seems to be today. To many mistakes are made and I wonder how many more innocent people are in prison because of a mistaken memory. Makes you think…
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/psytoday.htm
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/loftus.htm
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm
Even though Elizabeth Loftus’s research is used in defending the innocent against heinous accusations, people still send her hate mail. People send her letters that describe in detail what tore their family apart and it always includes someone accusing someone else (most likely a parent) of sexual abuse when they were a child. I was just really surprised at how many cases there really were of this.
I read her article called "Misinformation and Memory" that was published in Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1989. I find this very interesting because you can alter critical details of someone’s memory simply by implanting a thought into that person’s head. In the article the event where ‘Mike’ remembers a screwdriver when he had seen a hammer but said screwdriver because someone else said they had seen a screwdriver. ‘Mike’ knew that the object was metal, but when he heard another talk about a screwdriver then ‘Mike’ was sure the object was a screwdriver. It goes to show how suggestions can manipulate and change details of a person’s memory.
Loftus’s research is controversial because she is making discoveries that are having a huge impact on trial cases. People who are trying to figure out what is wrong in their life are going to therapy, having memories of sexual abuse appear, and then they are told that the abuse didn’t really happen. Some people are so sure that someone has taken advantage of them and hurt them in such a way that they may never look the same at them again. Then they go to court over it only to find out that the abuse only happened in their head and not in real life. But there may be a case where someone was abused and this research would show them as a liar when they really were abused. I do believe that there are innocent people in jail (not many but a few) and these people may be in there because of false accusations as a result of false eyewitness testimony.
In memory evidence in particular, her research has helped understand why innocent people end up in jail. An eyewitness is one of the best pieces of evidence (besides a recording of the event) that can be used against someone in court. But as her research shows, memories change with time. It can explain why someone’s statement to the police may change. Memory can be reconstructed to agree with someone else’s memory of the same event. This is very important because to make a strong case you need all eyewitness testimony to say the same thing. Unfortunately, if one eyewitness recalls something different, it could just be them or it could also be that everyone else’s story is the one that is incorrect. I think that law enforcement officers should know about this research so that innocent people don’t go to jail and so that the right criminal can be caught.
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/
“The most horrifying idea is that what we believe with all our hearts is not necessarily the truth” –Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, 1996
I think Elizabeth Loftus is one of the most interesting and amazing psychological researchers. I was already somewhat familiar with her work. For my research methods class I am doing a study on the effect of investigative suggestiveness on eyewitness memory, and her articles account for a lot of the basis of my proposal. Her work on memory is one of the most fascinating but controversial there is. She has performed numerous studies that exemplify the existence of the misinformation effect and the creation of false memories. She received her bachelor’s degree in Math and Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles. She then went on to get her master’s and doctorate from Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. in 1970, in psychology. She has also received six honorary doctorates for her research.
One type of her research that is very important to me is the notion of the misinformation effect. This is where people who are given misinformation about an event that they have witnessed will be more likely to say that misinformation actually occurred than if they were not given that information. The most known study of hers to deal with this is the reconstruction of automobile destruction. In this study, students were split into groups and then viewed videos of two cars engaging in an accident. Each group was given a question about how fast the cars were going, but each group had a different verb. This is what the questions looked like:
1. About how fast were the cars going when they collided with each other?
2. About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?
3. About how fast were the cars going when they bumped into each other?
4. About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?
5. About how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?
The results showed that the more severe the verb used, the higher the speed was estimated:
Smashed: 40.8 miles per hour
Collided: 39.3 miles per hour
Bumped: 38.1 miles per hour
Hit: 34.2 miles per hour
Contacted: 31.8 miles per hour
They did a second study with the same principle. The video contained a four second scene of a multiple care pile-up. The same questions were used, but they were also asked if there was any broken glass at the scene. They found that the more intense the verb, the more glass was reported, when in fact there was none. The last group had no question about speed:
Smashed: 16 students claimed they could remember seeing broken glass whereas 34 said there was none present.
Hit: 7 students remembered glass but 43 were correct in thinking there was none.
No Question: 6 students could recall broken glass and 44 could not.
This study concluded that using verbs that are more suggestible plays a part in believing something happened when it didn’t.
https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/LoftusPalmer74.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_of_automobile_destruction
Another interesting phenomenon that she has discovered is most relevant to this topic, the concept of false memories. Dr. Loftus created the “Lost in the mall technique” where she wanted to show that people can be implanted with false memories. She chose participants that she made sure had never been lost in a mall. She gave them four short stories describing events supposedly provided by family members. She asked them to recall these. One of the narratives was of them being lost in a mall when they were about 5 or 6 years old. They were told that they were searched for, for a very long time before an elderly person found them and reunited them with their family. The stories were based on actual family stopping trips and had believable details in them. In result, 25% of participants said they remembered this event, even though it actually never occurred. Many of them also provided details that were not supplied by the researchers. Loftus concluded that imagining events leads one to create false memories about the event.
Here is a website that has a program she appeared at, it is a little over an hour long, but if you are interested in her work, I suggest you watch it. I have not had a chance to watch the whole thing yet, but the clips I have seen are interesting.
http://fora.tv/2009/07/14/Elizabeth_Loftus_Whats_the_Matter_with_Memory
Although this study seems compelling, it has been criticized over and over. Many people argued with the conclusion that the concept can create false memories of child sexual abuse. The study was repeated using the subjects’ family members for the interviews and done with younger children. The results proved similar, with younger children being more influential. One thing was evident though, when the story was of a painful and embarrassing enema, a much smaller number of children reported remembering this. Critiques questioned the possibility of confounding variables and whether a therapist could create the false memories of child rape.
Many comments written about her work criticize that she is not a clinician, but a researcher. They say that her studies do not show that this could actual be applied to child sexual abuse. It is repeated that her methods are ones that would not naturally occur in therapy, thus making her studies inconsistent with the real world. There was a study where she showed a Disney World flyer with Bugs Bunny on it. She then asked people who they remember meeting at Disney World. Many of them said Bugs Bunny and would even give details of their meeting. People have criticized this study because they argue, how often are you going to be given a doctored photo in your therapists office? Will you get one depicting child sexual abuse or that nature? How would this actual show that therapists could induce these memories without the same aids that the studies use? I think that there are some valid arguments out there against her work. One being the point that the methods she uses would not be ones that would occur naturally; however, the question is whether or not memory is malleable to begin with. She explores if we can create false memories at all, which has been exemplified time and time again. Her studies have also shown that using different words can change a person’s perception and memory of an event. Another problem people have with her work is that they say her findings give people like rapists and murderers crutches to rely on for defense. She has testified in big cases such as Ted Bundy, O.J. Simpson, the Hillside Stranglers, and the McMartin preschool trial (which if you haven’t heard of, watch the movie the Indictment, very good).
Even though there are some weak points in here studies, they have had a profound effect on how we view eyewitness testimony. There have been hundreds of innocent people saved from going to prison because of situations like these. If not for her work, we may never have discovered that there are circumstances where people are made to believe something that didn’t truly happen. It has opened the eyes of the criminal justice system to hold people accountable for their actions and make sure that what happened is what happened. It has also shown how important documentation is for certain things, such as confidence in identifying the “offender”. If the person isn’t confident the first time, but then are influenced that this person really did it, 100%, by the investigators, is that what they really know, or is it a fabrication of the investigators?
Other websites used:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/loftus.htm
https://www.ipce.info/library_3/files/lotfus_implanted.htm
So in researching Elizabeth Loftus i found out that she is an extremely intelligent woman pushing the envelope with memory research. She does a lot of research on the brain and specifically memory which plays a key role in any court case. When a crime occurs, witnesses, victims, and perpetrators are not on the stand the next day. Everyone involved is asked over and over again what they saw, heard and remember so memory evidence is vital in assuring a case is solved accurately. I was most surprised by an article saying that Loftus was confused on the stand at one point and struggled to explain her research. She seems like someone who would be on her toes at all time and fully able to back up her research at any given point in time. But the most interesting research was as follows: "Consider one of the imagination exercises. Participants are told to imagine playing inside at home after school, hearing a strange noise outside, running toward the window, tripping, falling, reaching out and breaking the window with their hand. In addition, we asked participants questions such as "What did you trip on? How did you feel?" In one study 24 percent of the participants who imagined the broken-window scenario later reported an increase in confidence that the event had occurred, whereas only 12 percent of those who were not asked to imagine the incident reported an increase in the likelihood that it had taken place." She argues that an act of imagination simply makes the event seem more familiar and that familiarity is mistakenly related to childhood memories rather than to the act of imagination. Imagination and the mind are very interesting aspects of psychology and relate to cases involving false memories maybe created by imagination in a therapy session. Her work has been controversial because studies of the mind are very hard to record accurately. At this point in technological development we have no way to see what is actually going on in the mind of any given human being. Just because someone marks that they believe something happened on a survey does not by any means ensure that they actually felt that way or that the event happened. Any studies with non record-able memory evidence has a right to be scrutinized. Her work sheds light on new ways to look at cases involving memory and the mind, and opens the door for countless opportunities for research and investigation. Without her out-of-the-box thinking cases involving memory including the Romona case would have turned out differently.
Elizabeth Loftus is best known for her expertise on the human memory. Most of her research has been completed on false memories and misinformation effects. She has worked on many well known cases such as Ted Bundy, O.J. Simpson, the Hillside Stranglers and the McMartin Preschool Trial.
Loftus worked on a study known as the Lost in the Mall techniques. Which was a process of planting false memories and seeing how long they may last and see how much they may manifest. The results are somewhat surprising to me in the sense because a lot of details are added throughout the process. And if these details are adding in a controlled study, how are we all the believe this isn't happening in court rooms. This study also led to a lot of controversy and hate mail for Loftus. A lot of people were worried damage had been done, and it was all around unethical. Most were checked up on later and were without most of the memories they had claimed to have been implanting with.
I really find all the research of false memories very interesting, personally. It is very important that when situations in the court deal with the uncertainty of memories that they are dealt with properly. We cannot press charges to someone that is innocent because they made claims of repressed memories. This issue is incredibly difficult to deal with, and sadly part of the reason many have issues with the research is because it is like testing the waters. We have to find out the possibility of implanting memories to see how it works. I would definitely say she has done beneficial work for us and yet people have the right to be upset about the matter of learning about the possibility.
Elizabeth Loftus is a huge proponent of the idea that memory is very fragile. I personally support this point of view also, making this topic all the more interesting for myself. One of the biggest themes that comes across when we take courses in cognitive psychology is the suppremecy of the brain as a biological being. It does what it needs to do to reduce the amount of grey matter that will be used, the amount of brain glucose it will use and has various mechanisms to weigh how important the fact to be recalled is to remember. It won't remember some facts if it's not going to influence survival at a later time.
These are the biological bases of the fragility of memory that is so highlighted by Loftus. She also does expert testimony in trials and presumably has saved many innocent people from getting executed. I wanted to read some of the things she has written. There were a few really interesting titles that caught my attention. Some of these are: "Imagination and... power", "Imagination inflation", "Dream interpretations and false belief", and "the price of bad memories." Because of time constraints, I haven't got to them. Maybe I'll read them and then post again on this blog.
I found a quote from her that I really like: "what we think we know and believe with all our hearts isn't' necessarily the truth." This is a partial quote so it's not the whole thing, but it gets the point across really well. After a point, we must ask ourselves what it is that really happened and if our past is not what we think it is. But this is a largely philosophical debate. As psychologists, we must adjust ourselves to the idea that our experiences and recall of experiences are not objective.
On a day to day basis, I don't really care if I went to JCPenny or Younkers last saturday. But, if suddenly I have to remember it to prove that I am innocent, I don't know what I would do. And I think this is a good counter to people who oppose Loftus's theory by saying that she focuses her studies on nontraumatic events, making her findings inapplicable to traumatic events. The point is, memory has failings at all times. These failings do not matter in normal life. But they become a big deal if that information is used in the court systems. One of Loftus's findings is that memory deteriorates at both extremes of the arousal spectrum. Being interviewed by police is highly stressful, suggesting that it is also more likely to be damaged memory.
Loftus has also found that the wording of questions could give preference to one form of answer to another. As part of our class project, when I was interviewing some people, I found this to be a very perplexing problem. It seemed that if I posed my question in a particular way, I would get some answer, then change the question to validate that it was the truth and I would get a contradictory answer!
Loftus's work is definitely very important to the scientific community (interms of some of the findings I have already discussed). I tend to agree with her findings, but I am not convinced that they are the full answer. I feel, although I have no way of proving it, that some events are better recalled than Loftus expresses they are. Unfortunately, I have no real knowledge in this area and fall short.
Loftus has very interesting theories on memory. First of all, one theory states that eyewitness memory can be very unreliable. This is partly because false memories can be created due to trauma. The individual is not lying, but rather whole heartedly believes that their memory is the truth, even when it never happened. Loftus' theory also suggests that repressed childhood memories may resurface, but could possibly be inaccurate. She has done work to try and retrieve these memories through hypnosis, regression, group therapy, and other techniques. She also researched how events prior to witnessing a crime or event may effect the witness's memory of that event.
Loftus began with research in the distortion of memories. Her research supported the claim that after a crime is witnessed and is later discussed or brought up, memories will become distorted and change. Another area of research done by Loftus is the "imagination inflation." In these studies, Loftus and her colleagues wanted to find out how imagining an event happening affected the belief that it really did happen. The results concluded that imagination inflation does exist. That is, when an individual is told to imagine something happening, they are far more likely to believe that it actually happened, even when it did not truly happen. I thought this imagination inflation theory was very interesting, but it makes complete sense, especially when applied to law. If someone is told to imagine that they witnessed a murder, and told to imagine it in very specific detail, it seems logical that they would eventually believe that imaginary scenario happened. This is also the topic that I found most fascinating, surprising, and would love to learn more about. I would like to know exactly what causes these false memories to be created and how they develop throughout time.
I think the work of Loftus has been controversial because people may not want to hear that their beliefs or memories are false, or the result of an external source falsely planting the memories. Memories, especially from traumas or childhood, are very sensitive subjects. If someone truly believes that they were abused as a child, they probably do not want to hear that their memories never happened. On one website that I found, there were examples of people actually suing psychiatrists for planting false memories during hypnosis or other types of therapy. It also may be controversial because some of her studies actually did cause subjects to have belief in false memories. These people may then be affected by the same false memories for the rest of their lives.
Loftus has made great contributions to the understanding of memory and memory evidence. It has first helped us understand that despite common public beliefs, memory evidence really is not very reliable, especially in very traumatic events such as rape. It has also helped us understand how memories can be falsely created and develop into very strong beliefs about actual events. This was also discussed in the Costanzo & Krauss textbook in regards to eyewitness testimony. There are many factors that affect memory and memory evidence. Loftus has provided us with alternative explanations that not only involve the event itself, but other life factors and memories from before the event.
Websites used:
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/loftus.htm
Elizabeth Loftus is listed as 58th of the 100 top psychologists of the 20th century by The Review of General Psychology, the highest woman on the list. She is among the 20 most mentioned psychologists in textbooks. Elizabeth Loftus has received six honorary degrees and has published numerous books. A staunch believer in justice, Loftus has acted as a defense witness in over 250 cases. Her work on memory reconstruction has redirected the way memory is used in court and studied in psychology.
I learned Elizabeth Loftus had an unfortunate childhood. She remembers being fondled by a babysitter, but this memory is eclipsed by the drowning of her mother when Elizabeth was 14 years old. She hardly remembers her mother, sad when I consider she is regarded as on the world's foremost experts on memory.
Elizabeth attended UCLA and earned her Bachelor's in math and psychology in 1966. In 1970 she received her P.h.D from Stanford University. While attending university Loftus studied long-term memory, this sparked her interest in and study of memory repression and recovery. Loftus has always been aware of the need for accurate witness testimony, her work made her skeptical of the prevailing idea that memory replay is exact. She believed, and later showed, memory recall is malleable.
One of Elizabeth Loftus' earliest work was the lost in the mall study. Loftus was able to successfully "implant" a false memory of being lost in the mall in 25% of her test group. She tested yound children and adolescents she was sure had not been lost in the mall before. This study strongly showed the possibility of false memory being accompanied by witness enthusiasm and belief, as those who "remembered" being lost in the mall began to "recover" vivid details and became more committed to the belief. Using only the power of suggestion, Elizabeth Loftus cast doubt on the veracity of all witness testimony.
Loftus' most famous works were discussed in class. I read she pursued her famous car contact/crash scenario after becoming stagnated in her other work. She asked herself what she is able to talk about at parties and realized her work with witness testimony was her chief interest. According to an article I found, Loftus has said, "I just decided one day that I wanted something with more practical application than that [long-term memory]. I asked myself, 'What do I talk about at parties, when there is no reward attached, except that I am interested in it?' My answer: legal stuff." After a friend let her know money is awarded for traffic studies Elizabeth struck upon her now renowned work. She began to examine how witness memory can be influenced by the phrasing of a question (e.g. hit vs. crash, stop vs. turn) This initial work was enough to gain Elizabeth Loftus recognition, but it was not enough to satisfy her desire to make a difference.
Elizabeth has served as a defense attorney for Ted Bundy and O.J. Simpson. Her work has gained criticism from opponents in psychology and law. During the childcare abuse scandals of the 1980s and 1990s Elizabeth challenged the ideas holding up the advocates case. During this scandal scores of childcare workers were arrested and charged with abuse, including allegations of satanic rituals and bestiality. The charges against these workers were based entirely on "recovered" memories from children. As I read the cases involved with the much larger scandal, I felt as though I were being slapped in the face with five fingers of hindsight. Many cases were rushed, extremely questionable and leading interrogation techniques were used, and many cases seemed to follow a predicable pattern of witness involvement. Although these cases may have been the expression of a deeper sense of anxiety experienced by the American public, Loftus saw through the hysteria and sought the truth. Her work has helped overturn the tide of accusations based solely on recovered memory.
I found it interesting that Elizabeth's own interest in justice and the danger of false accusation based on false memory led to her own dismissal from the University of Washington. This was due to a Jane Doe case. Jane was a young girl when she testified her mother had abused her. Jane was videotaped at six detailing the abuse, but she could not remember any specifics eleven years later when she watched the tape for the first time. After a while, Jane "recovered" the memory, a case claimed by proponents of memory recovery. Elizabeth was suspicious of the case, and later began to suspect the idea of the abuse was planted in Jane's mind by her stepmother and father in order to win her custody during divorce proceedings. Elizabeth felt her investigation was more journalistic than academic and made several precautions to respect the rights of Miss Doe. Despite this, Elizabeth's interest in the case back-lashed when Jane became aware of the interest and complained of a violation of privacy. Elizabeth was let go from the University of Washington. In the end, however, Elizabeth is proud that Jane Doe's case cannot be used as precedent in court, and I think that speaks volumes to her character.
Elizabeth Loftus is known for her controversial research on memory. She is from Bel Air, California and went to UCLA. She started out wanting to be a math teacher but was drawn to psychology after she began college. She went to Stanford for graduate school. She became interested in long term memory while attending Stanford. Today, Elizabeth Loftus is a professor at both the University of California and University of Washington. Elizabeth Loftus is the author of many books and articles about memory. She was number fifty-eight out of one-hundred on a list of the most influential researchers in psychology in the twenty-first century. She was also the highest ranked woman on the list. She has worked as an expert witness in over 200 court cases and has worked in many high profile cases like Ted Bundy, OJ Simpson and the Hillside Stranglers.
A lot of people dislike her and her work and even received hate mail on a regular basis. She has done research on eyewitness testimony, false memories, and repressed memories. She famous for her “lost in the mall” technique. It is used to explain how someone can recover memories of experiences that never happened. Elizabeth Loftus gave participants four stories about a childhood event that was supposedly told from a family member and asked them to recall the memory. One of the stories was false about being lost in a mall and the participant would “recall” a memory about a time when he or she was lost in a mall. In the study, a quarter of the participants were able to “remember” the event that never occurred. A lot of participant even added things to the story that never happened either. Elizabeth Loftus concluded that leading questions can create false memories. She disagrees, just like I do, that one can suppress memories of sexual abuse and recover the memories years later. Her research is controversial because people may be interpreting her research as calling victims of sexual abuse liars and I do not believe that is what she is trying to do at all. She has been an expert witness on the defense of high profile cases in which the victim is stating they are victim of sexual abuse but repressed the memories for several years. Questioning whether or not someone is telling the truth about being sexually abused as a child is very controversial no matter what.
I found it really interesting that Elizabeth Loftus herself had a false memory. When she was young her mother had drowned and she was told years later by her uncle that she was the one that had discovered the body, but the uncle was actually mistaken. She found out later by her uncle a few days later that he had made a mistake. During the time in-between memories of the even came flooding back to her about when she discovered the body. These were false memories, she fell a victim of the very thing she has spent the majority of her career researching. Elizabeth Loftus has made it clear that memory is not as infallible as one used to believe. People assume that someone’s memory is like a video camera and it is a lot more complex than that. It is crazy to think that memories can just be implanted into our brains. I thought memories were more black and white than that. It is not either a memory or not a memory. Imagination and other factors distort and make the memory completely different than what it was to start out with. And the memory that someone has to start out with is usually not even correct either.
Memories can not only be planted into someone’s mind but they can be altered as well. This was shown is the car crash experiment that Loftus helped conduct. Participants were shown a video of a car crash and asked the same questions later but with different wording. They were asked how fast were the cars going when they hit each other or they were asked how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other. When the participant was the asked the question with the word smashed as the verb the participant reported that the cars were going at a higher speed as compared to the participants asked the same question but using the word hit instead. Overall I really enjoyed reading over her life and work. I agreed with a lot of her research and I am definitely on her side when it comes to the repressed memories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus
http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/loftus.html
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/loftus.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_the_mall_technique
Elizabeth F. Loftus is a professor of psychology and a professor of law at the University of Washington. She received her Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford Univeristy in 1970. He focus that she studied was: human memory, eyewitness testimony and courtroom procedure. Loftus has published 18 books and more than 250 scientific articles and has been an expert witness in hundreds of trials..such as the McMartin preschool molestation case. Her famous book Eyewitness Testimony won the National Media Award from the American Psychological Foundation. She has received honorary doctorates from Miami University, Leiden Univeristy and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Loftus has recently been elected president of the American Psychological Society.
-http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm
I was really surprised as to how qualified Loftus is. She seems to have many experiences to make her more than qualified especially to be the president of the American Psychological Society.
I decided to do more research on the McMartin Preschool Molestation Case. This trial was the longest and most expensive trial in American History. When it was all over 7years later, 15 million dollars later, there was still no verdict.
The case goes as follows: Mother Judy Johnson of her son who is 2 1/2 years old whom attend McMartin preschool. Johnson told detectives that school aid Ray Buckley the 25 year old son of the owner had raped her son. Despite the fact that her son was unable to identify pictures. Children were manipulated to think the they were raped although no evidence showed they were. Loftus was the expert witness in regards to false memories in this case.
-http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mcmartin/mcmartinaccount.html
A quote said by Loftus: The most horrifying idea is that what we believe with all our hearts is not necessarily the truth.
What is controversial about Loftus's theories is that she challenges to interpret repressed memories. Many people want to believe all that a child has to say. It should however be noted that they can easily be swayed in what they say. Loftus does not deny child sexual abuse occurs or that it might be possible for the mind to repress a trauma, she questions the accuracy of the memories. She strives to resurface these memories. She specifically researches the term "Memory Work" which is the means of process of retrieving repressed memories through invasive therapeutic techniques such as regression, dream work, hypnosis, visualization, group therapy, and suggestion by a therapist.
Loftus gives lost of evidence as to how the use of "memory work" plays a role in memories that lead to false memories that become true to the victims although they never existed.
-http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/loftus.htm
Loftus does not believe that memories can be repressed. "Imagination not only can make people believe they have done simple things that they have not done but also can lead people to believe that they have experienced more complex events." Loftus
http://www.libraryindex.com/pages/1431/Repressed-Memory-Versus-False-Memory-STUDIES-ON-FALSE-MEMORIES.html
You can be easily convinced of many things. It is amazing that Elizabeth Loftus has studied and questioned what you would just assume to be correct. Verbal evidence used to be taken as pretty legit evidence, but it is now understood thanks to Loftus as something far more complicated. I totally understand how her studies are controversial, they do however have plenty of merit and credibility. I thoroughly enjoyed learning more about Loftus.
Elizabeth Loftus was born in Los Angeles, California in October 1944, to parents Sidney and Rebecca Fishman. She obtained her BA in math and psychology in 1968 at UCLA, then she married Geoffrey Loftus. She attended Stanford University for grad school where she became interested in long term memory, she received her MA in 1967 and Ph.D. in 1973, she is currently a psychology professor at the University of Washington, because of her intense research of the mind and memories she is known as the “Diva of Disclosure,” which was the title of an article about her research. She studies false memory, repressed memories due to traumatic situations, and eyewitness accounts. She has focused on sexual abuse stories and defending accused offenders, she has been an expert witness in many trials on unreliable eyewitness testimonies, she also has written 19 books on her research, and written almost 200 articles. Her research in sexual molestation cases interests me, because I have read about so many people who were falsely accused of molestation because of repressed memories.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/dna/interviews/loftus.html
Q: What happens to a person's memory in a traumatic experience?
LOFTUS: One of the things that we know about memory is that when you experience something extremely upsetting or traumatic, you don't just record the event like a video tape machine would work, the process is much more complex and what's happening is you're taking in bits and pieces of the experience, you're storing some information about the experience, but it's not some indelible image that you're going to be able to dig out and replay later on.
I find it interesting, her research on traumatic experiences and how the brain processes and stores the information.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/loftus.htm
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/
Elizabeth Loftus is a psychology professor at the University of Washington, but is more known for her expert research in the psychology field. She found her love for psychology as an undergrad at UCLA, where she then went on to study more aspects of psychology as well as memory at Stanford. Wanting to make a differnce in people's lives, Loftus works on traumatic experiences and eye witness credibility. Using her expertice and knowledge, she looked into many criminal cases. This eventually landed her in the courtroom as a witness on the stand. Loftus has appeared over 200 times, for both the defense and state, on the unreliability of eye witness testimony. According to Loftus, eye witness memory can be altered by triggers or false implatations. These memories can even be created by oneself as discussed in the following article:
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm
Loftus has testified in numerous cases, and helped out numerous families. She even testified in the Ted Bundy case, one of the most famous in American history. With that experience, it is no wonder she has made such a name for herself in both the psychological and judicial community.
What i found most interesting about Loftus' research is that when one testifies as an eye witness they truely believe that they are correct in their identification. This may be one of the reasons her work is so controverial. People trust themselves and truely believe that they are correct and if someone tells them otherwise the witness may have their doubts about the research. I know that if i testified as an eye witness and my credibility was in question i would be offended and sceptical. I also now know that when people are found to be wrong in eyewitness cases that they did not lie, the witness truely thought they had identified the right person. This can be shown further in one of Loftus' experiments: The "Shopping Mall Study". In this study, Loftus interviews people about their childhood experience. The experience of being lost in a shopping mall. Little to the knowledge of the participants they were never lost in the mall as a child. Loftus was making the whole story up. She would tell the participants she had details from their family memebers telling about the incident. Before long, Loftus had the participants believing, and even recalling, information about an event that never took place.
I found this research to be quite compelling and convincing. It was obvious that our brains are so sophisticated and complex that the participants were able to create memories of an event that never occured. It is a very interesting study and helps to poke wholes in eye witness testimony. Despite the fact that it puts scrutiny to eye witness testimony, people are still convicted, whether falsely or correctly, based on it. I think in some cases eye witness testimony is crucial, but i also believe that it should never been the sole evidence against a defendant. This is also where controversy may arise.
Despite the information from Loftus, and her extensive work within her studies, jurors still have pretty strong beliefs about eye witness testimony. I think this may be because the witness is so convincing, they seem to know all details and are very confident about them. This puts strain on the jury to decide how credible the witness really is.
I think this study and blog relates so much to what we talked about in class, as well as previous blogs. It also is very relatable to the course because it pertains to law, but more importantly, psychology. Through biological psychology we can make a witness seem less reliable and therefore, in some cases, keep innocent people out of prison. Loftus' research is very important to the scientific and judical community.
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_the_mall_technique
Dr. Loftus is truly an amazing woman. She has written and published so much information on memory it is truly remarkable. Honestly, the monumental amount of work this woman has done for the field is the most surprising thing to me.
For years, I used to rag on my mom about how horrible her memory is (the woman can't even remember the title of a movie she watched last week). But after reading and learning about the research Dr. Loftus has done, it makes me doubt some of my own memories. For instance, my mother and I had a conversation a while back about what our first memory is (I really don't know how we even got on the subject). She seemed quite shocked I was able to recall an event from when I was around 2 years old. What is the event? Me crawling out of my crib. I was able to describe to mother, in detail no-less, how I remember her placing me in my crib, shutting off my light, and leaving my room. I then remember pushing down the drop-side of my crib, climbing out and running back downstairs to the living room. Heck, I even remember her saying "Oh great, looks like it's time to get Ashley a normal bed."
I remember that I had a orangish-brown wooden crib and I even remembered that it placed against the same wall that my light fixture was on. Everything about this memory is sooo extremely vivid that after learning what I have about memories, I really wonder if this is a true memory or if it is a story that was told to me at some point in my lifetime. At this point I'm not so sure. In fact, I've spent a lot of time picking the memory apart to determine how I might have acquired these details that my mother confirmed were true. I'm fairly confident that there aren't any pictures of my room when my crib was in there (which would explain how I could recall the details about it's location). The crib itself was also used by my brothers and I know there are pictures of them in the crib so that could explain how I know what it looked like. But then again, maybe it truly is a real memory. I'd like to think it is because then I can brag to my mom just how good my memory is. ;)
Regardless, it's so amazing just how easily a memory can be implanted or altered. And then how real it becomes (which if my story above is not a real remembered memory then I definitely can relate). Perhaps this is why her work is so controversial. The altered memories are so vivid and realistic that it's almost impossible to believe that their origin may not come from the real source of the memory.
i forgot to incorporate the link that I read about Dr. Loftus's research: http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm