Courage Under Fire

Right off the bat, it was pretty clear to me how memory was going to strongly tie into this movie. It opened with a scene that anyone who was watching could tell would come back and haunt Serling throughout the movie, and his memory would be tested time and time again regarding this traumatic memory that would stick with him for the rest of his life. Another event involving Cpt. Walden would also elicit many different witness accounts and many differing views on what really happened.

Serling goes on in the beginning to interview a group of men who were in some trouble in the desert and were saved by Cpt. Walden’s helicopter. He went around the room asking what happened, and it seemed as if the men were feeding off of each other because they themselves couldn’t remember all of the little details of the event for some reason or another. This was a shining example of how eyewitness accounts can vary depending on the person and what that person encountered. This can be due to the environment that surrounds them, the situation that they were in (was it a high stress situation?), if it was daytime or nighttime, or if the person was injured (specifically a head injury). All of these factors can potentially play a very large role in the amount of information collected from witnesses and if the information is completely accurate or not. You could also see a little bit of these men’s memory trace starting to deteriorate. It hadn’t been that long since the incident had happened, but time only allows for vulnerability and corruption of memories. Memory does not typically get better with time.

Serling then goes on the interview a name named Alerio. He was present on the helicopter that went down with Capt. Walden on board. This interview was the first where I noticed Serling using an audio recorder. This is huge when interview witnesses simply because it allows the interviewer to go back and listen to what the person said as many times as they want. If they were not recording, they would then have to rely on their own memory and notes to recall what the witness said. There were a few different scenes in the movie where Serling goes back and listens to the recordings and picks something up that he missed during the initial interview. One thing that stood out right away to me about Alerio’s interview was that he had a discrepancy with the other accounts on when the M-16 ammo ran out. I wasn’t sure at first as to why this may have been the case, but I figured it was him being nervous and therefore not being able to fully remember the event. As we later learn in the movie, this was not the whole story. I would definitely say he was nervous, but fear and shame/stress seemed to be an issue as well. Alerio was scared to tell the full truth because he was scared on Monfriese, but also ashamed of his actions. This was evident because he wanted to get the interview over as fast as possible, and mentioned how he never wanted to tell the story again. All of this was paired with the high amount of stress that all of these people were under during this event. You may know what happened in your own head to a certain extent, but the more fear and shame there is going along with other estimator factors, you may start to alter what happened in your mind just to make yourself feel more at ease about the situation. This is why Alerio’s account was different and why his memory was not as good as it should have been.

Monfriese was the next person that Serling interviewed. You could tell something was off with this one immediately. Even though it was blatantly clear that he was lying about what happened, I thought that Serling did a good job of using leading and suggestive comments/questions in order to get as much accurate information out of Monfriese as possible. There were times during the scene where Monfriese is working out that you can see it on his face that he is remembering something that he hadn’t before simply because Serling worded a question a certain way. This is definitely a tactic that can be used successfully when trying to help witnesses recall as much information as possible.

As far as Serling himself and what he had encountered, I think the memory of his event was burnt into his mind and it would be for the rest of his life. He didn’t seem to have any issues remembering the details. In fact, towards the end when Gordon was playing the tape from inside his Serling’s tank, Serling could be seen reciting word for word what he had said that fateful evening. I’m not sure if he could remember small details like that simply because he held himself personally responsible for the death of his friend so that made it practically impossible to forget or if it was due to other extraneous variables. The fact that he was so hard on himself and was constantly having flashbacks really explains to me personally why he had an easier time with memory retrieval when compared to people in other types of situations.

I definitely think that psychology of the personality came into play during this movie. Every person on Walden’s helicopter had a unique personality, and they all shined at some point throughout the movie. Specifically, Monfriese had a very volatile and cowardly personality, and that is what led to the shooting of Cpt. Walden. Captain Walden herself had a very courageous personality and she was the reason that the rest of the crew got out alive. These two clashing personality types were the sole reasons for the main events of the movie: the shooting of Cpt. Walden and the survival of the rest of her crew to eventually truthfully tell her story (well, everyone besides Monfriese of course!) I also feel that clinical psychology may have come into play during the movie as well. It seemed to me that Monfriese was suffering from some sort of disorder that caused him to act the way he acted, and to therefore kill himself. It points in the direction of depression of some sort or maybe bipolar disorder. You don’t usually see people acting the way he did in this movie without them suffering from some sort of mental disorder, whether it be mild or severe. Lastly, I think that perception played a rather large role in the film. Serling was constantly faced with having to perceive different kinds of stimuli in order to move forward with his investigation. If he didn’t have the keen abilities to have been able to sense when people were lying or trying to cover things up, the movie would have had a much different ending.

Terms: memory, memory trace, estimator factors, memory retrieval, psychology of the personality, clinical psychology, perception

Courage under Fire uses several types of psychology involved in the movie. This included forms of psychology such as cognitive, clinical and social.

One of the aspects of psychology was cognitive psychology, which involved memory. Many of the people at the scene of the plane crash struggled to remember what happened. Memory occurs in three steps which are encoding, storage and retrieval. Errors can occur in memory storage and retrieval, such as not paying close attention and not getting information properly encoded. Also, memory trace which is the “biochemical representation of our experience in the brain and appears to deteriorate over time” seemed to happen, because they were all in such a traumatic experience that it altered their perception of the event. No one had the exact same story, and they were all very inconsistent. Some of the witnesses praised Walden for her actions and for being a good captain. However, other people at the scene said that they thought she was the enemy, and would shoot at the people on her team. Somehow within the mist of all of the action, the men were unable to completely store what happened at the crime scene in their memory. Some could have possibly been able to comprehend what was happening at the moment and were able to act and do what they needed to do in order to survive, but were unable to store it all in their memory. In addition, they got rather large details mixed up when they told their account to Nat, such as how Walden got shot and died, and little details such as who ran out of ammunition first. Also, many of the men did not want to talk about what happened that day, which could mean they did not really want to say what happened and lied or they just could not remember. A cognitive interview was partly used when Nat used a step by step process to relax the eyewitness and slowly bring back memories. He did this by telling each person to relax and take their time and to remember what happened the day and night of the incidents. In addition, another setback, known as the weapon focus effect, can occur when the witness is threated with a weapon which harms their ability to remember and identify the perpetrator or other memories from an event. This occurred and applied when all of the people at the scene were always under the threat of being killed or hurt, which could have been a possible way for their memories to be altered.

Another type of psychology shown in this movie was clinical psychology. Many of the soldiers including the protagonist Nat seemed to suffer from mental illnesses from being out on the battlefield. Nat was forced to believe things dealing with the murder of Boyle, even if he did not believe those things happened. He went along with what the other generals and their story, because he was not completely one hundred percent sure he killed Boyler. Also, post-traumatic stress disorder seemed to be a common mental illness among all of the men. For instance, Nat seemed to have many bad nightmares over the course of the entire movie in which he was on fire or dying. It was also hard for Nat to see his best friend Boyler die, and contributed to Nat’s depressed state. In addition, Nat had little interest in communicating and enjoying his time with his family, which also made he seem unhappy and distressed. Nat drank a lot during the movie, claiming that he needed it, and did this whenever something bad happened. He could not really trust many people and could not talk to his wife which caused him to have to bottle a lot of emotions up in side. Some of the other men seemed to not be too depressed or suffering from mental illness, but just were very reserved when it came to what happened at the plane crash. Others such a staff Sergeant John Monfriez suffered from some sort of mental illness, and committed suicide.

Last but not least, social psychology was involved in this movie. One aspect that showed social psychology was the communication between Nat and all of the eye-witnesses. As he approached them, they seemed rather nervous and did not want to disclose any information. Nat tried his best to calm them down and continue with the conversations. It was also hard for Nat not to be able talk to anyone about what happened to him accidently killing Boyler in the tank, and about the situation dealing with Walden’s Medal of Honor. Another psychological concept that was used was the confirmation bias, which involved Nat wanting to prove his theory right that no one’s story added up right and he proved it wrong. The terrible communication between Nat and the witnesses really strained the success of getting an accurate story and account of all that occurred on the battlefield.

Psychology and eyewitness skills really were correlated and shown in this movie. Overall, their memories of the events were not accurate, the men suffered from many different psychological issues. The communication between the witnesses and Nat, who acted as a judge, was terrible. All in all, this movie had a lot of psychology and law in it, which can possibly show us how psychology and the legal system can be shown in everyday life.

Terms Used: encoding, storage, retrieval, perception, memory trace, cognitive psychology, memory, cognitive interview, the weapon focus effect, crime scene, clinical psychology, post-traumatic stress disorder social psychology, eye-witness, confirmation bias judge, account

I’m a huge Denzel fan so this is a movie that has always been on my list of “must-sees.” I had never seen the movie before this class, but I’m glad I finally had a reason to watch it! It’s quite obvious how memory is a huge factor in this film. I feel like two different story lines were going on: the investigation into Captain Walden and the investigation into Serling’s friendly fire situation. Throughout both of these stories, memory is a key factor in determining exactly what happened and in getting the facts straight.

Chapter 7 discusses the Manson Criteria and we can apply it to this movie. One of the criteria is the degree of certainty displayed by the witness; in other words, witness confidence. When Serling starts the investigation, one of the first soldiers he interviews is Illario, the med specialist. Illario seems, at first, to be very confident about what he’s saying. Serling asks Illario if Walden ever showed any fear or hesitation when she had to make life or death decisions, and without pausing, Illario confidently says no, she showed no fear. Later in the interview, however, we can see Illario’s confidence falter when asked to repeat what he had said earlier about the M16 and when it ran out of ammo. This hesitation and lower confidence causes Serling to become suspicious.

Another important factor discussed in chapter 7 is the idea of stress and weapon focus. We can see this clearly in the movie, especially in the scenes with Monfriez and Capt. Walden. When Monfriez is being interviewed by Serling, he even states how it’s hard to remember things correctly when the adrenaline is pumping. When we get another version of what happened, it’s easy to see how weapon focus may have been an issue. Monfriez and Walden had an apparent stand-off as a result of a disagreement. During this version, Walden sees an enemy sneak up behind Monfriez and shoots. Monfriez mistakenly thought Walden was shooting at him and, in turn, returns fire, shooting her in the stomach. From the book, we can conclude this situation was obviously highly stressful. Much focus was put on the weapons thus causing memory to be hazy, not only for Monfriez, but for the other eyewitnesses as well such as Illario.

The idea of scripts and preexisting expectations is also prevalent in the movie. For example, the first time Illario is interviewed he says that Walden never once showed any signs of weakness and that she was confident and lacked fear. We later find out, however, that Walden had a little break-down and cried due to “tension.” Illario may not have remembered this right away because of his preexisting expectations of a captain. Obviously at this time, most captains were men and men have been shown to be less emotional than women. In addition, a leader such as a captain is “supposed” to show no fear or hesitation, let alone cry because of tension.

Besides issues with memory and eyewitness accounts, we can also see aspects of social psychology throughout the movie. One scene in particular is when Monfriez is arguing with Capt. Walden about waiting around to get rescued. Monfriez is trying to persuade (or rather change his captain’s attitude about the situation) Walden to run for it rather than waiting to die. In addition, Monfriez calls on Illario to voice his opinion, and because of the peer pressure Illario feels to conform and follow Monfriez, Illario agrees with Monfriez.

Aspects of cognitive psychology are also seen in the film. We see that Serling experiences many bouts of cognitive dissonance (a feelings of discomfort when actions and behaviors don’t match). A prime example of this dissonance is when Serling is being pressured by General Hershberg to just finish the investigation and award Walden the Medal of Honor. Serling obviously sees problems and discrepancies in the situation and wants to finish the investigation despite Hershberg’s impatience. Another example of cognitive dissonance is between Serling’s guilt over accidently killing his friend and telling the truth to the parents.

Lastly, we can relate this movie back to the topic of clinical psychology. It seems as though Serling is experiencing some PTSD. We see scenes where he is dreaming about firing at the tank which killed his friend. Serling experiences nightmares and resorts to drinking as a result. In addition, Serling isolates himself from his family.

Terms: eyewitness, witness confidence, PTSD, clinical psychology, social psychology, cognitive dissonance, persuasion, scripts, preexisting expectations, weapon focus, stress,

The movie “Courage under Fire” was a very interesting film. It has many aspects of psychology in it. Some of those aspects include the process by which our mind turns our experiences into memory. It also includes the process of which individuals recall information. Another aspect of psychology that the movie explains is how eyewitness accounts can vary from individual. Also, those accounts might not be as accurate as they seem. So this brings up the question of the accuracy of the eyewitnesses account. Another aspect of psychology that the film looks into is the process of interrogation and how the stresses of that interrogation can lead to findings that don’t represent the truth. Another aspect of psychology that the film showed was the process by which victims of traumatic events tend to relive the traumatic experiences. This can lead to individuals getting hooked on drugs or alcohol. The final area of psychology that the film looked at was the way that Denzel’s character actually acquired the information from the individuals. He was calm with them and made them feel comfortable. This allowed him to finally get the information out of them that they wanted. The first aspect of psychology that happened in the film was the process of which information is stored, processed, and retrieved from the brain. In the film, when Denzel’s character starts off by asking the downed helicopter crew their side of the story. They tell Sterling (Denzel’s character) what happened. They said that they were saved by a helicopter pilot by the name of Karen Walden. They explain how the helicopter was able to destroy the enemy tank as well as well as shoot the remainder of the bad guys that were firing at them. They then explained how the helicopter crashed. In the morning they heard in coming friendly helicopters. They said that when they were picked up, they still heard M16 shots being fired. This was something that all men of the crew told Sterling that they were for sure of. The psychological process that the crew just went through involved the brain. First off, the brain through the process of encoding, gathered information so that it could be held in memory. That included things such as the gun fire from the M16 or the time of day that the event was happening. The second process of the memory process is called storage, it refers to the brains ability to hold onto the encoded messages that it receives. This process talks about the actual information that the troops were able to remember and then give to Sterling. The third and final process of the memory process is called retrieval. The retrieval process refer,s to accessing and pulling out the stored information at a later time. This process however can be affected by many different things. For example, if the event was traumatic, it could be possible for different individuals to remember different things about the event. In the case of the movie, some of the solders weren’t able to recall information as accurately as others. Another thing that could influence a person’s ability to recall information is the time between events. I know that I can barely remember what I did last week. This event took place months or maybe even years ago. I am not sure the movie really specified. The problem with this scene in the movie when it comes to psychology however is that we know for a fact that eyewitness misidentification can lead to the wrong person being convicted. You can relate this to the film in that a person might not be able to recall the facts exactly how they happened. If a person being raped can cause them to be mistaken when recalling information, you would think that having people shoot at you would do the same. Another aspect of psychology that can be talked about in the movie is the aspect of stress and weapons focus. This is brought up in chapter seven of the Forensic science and Legal Psychology book. The chapter talks about a study that was done to see how high stress levels affect solders abilities to recall information and how accurate that information is. In the movie, this is obviously shown when Sterling interviews all solders that were present the day of the event. All of them were under some sort of stress and that affected how well they were able to recall information. For example, Specialist Illario’s ability to recall information could have been hurt by the stressful conditions that were taking place during the crash and so on. In the book, they preformed a study on 509 solders. They put the solders through events that were both high and low stress events. The results showed that information was recalled at a rate of 71% correct under low stress conditions. However, under high stress conditions, the recall percentage was roughly 38%. This study shows that stressful events can affect how well individuals recall information. In the film, Specialist Illario and the others were able to remember the events; however, they lied about the events. In the case of Specialist Illario, he wasn’t able to recall when the M16 ammunition ran out. Even though it turned out that he knew when the ammo actually ran out, when the scene initially happens it looks like he couldn’t recall when the ammo actually did. This aspect of psychology can be related back to the Weapon focus effect. How can it relate to the movie? Well for one, solders that are under those current conditions might focus on the weapons that were used by the enemies. In the movie “Courage under Fire,” Sterling is always able to remember the firing of the weapons of his tank. He also remembers the firing of weapons. Another example of this was when the Altameyer is only able to recall the “Fire” that he saw after the events happened that day. Of course, the medication could have had something to do with his inability to recall information. However, this does show that individuals focus on the weapons and other aspects that can be life threatening to them. This can lead them to overlook other details; the reason being that they are so focused on their own life and not so much about what is going on around them. This was also shown when the solders focus on the M16 gunfire. Even though it wasn’t being shot at them, they still remember the firing of the gun they said that there was no other sound like it. This could also be linked back to the Weapon focus effect because they focused on the weapon. They in fact said that they were so certain that it was an M16. It was the one thing that they were for sure on. This also can lead to the psychological term of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. This basically explains that an event was so bad and so traumatic that it affects the victim after it happened. It was also shown when Sterling would wake up in the night scared because he heard the firing of his tanks guns. The biggest area of psychology that I saw in the film was Cognitive dissonance. This is explained in chapter seven. What it basically means is once the victim commits to accusing a certain individual of a crime; they will do anything to justify it being that person. That includes changing their story to match what they think actually happened. This also leads for individuals not to say that they were wrong to start with even if they know that they were wrong because they don’t want to take back their word. This is shown in the film by Sterling when he goes to his friend’s funeral and is forced to say that his friend was killed by enemy fire. Another example of this is when talks to the other solders and they tell him there version of the story. He doesn’t want to change his story because of how the white house wants the story to be told. It would make for a better story if they told it the way that everyone thought it happened. The final area of psychology that I will be focusing on is the way that Sterling was able to acquire the information from individuals. He tried to make them feel comfortable around him so that they would be more willing to give information. This can be related back the book term called cognitive interview. This involves the step by step process of trying to make the victim relaxed enough to recall information. You saw this when Sterling was willing to not be too pushy when trying to find information. It wasn’t until he was “threatened” that he actually acted differently. Overall, it was a very interesting film and I am glad that I got to watch it.
Terms used: cognitive interview, Cognitive dissonance, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, Weapon focus effect, retrieval, storage, encoding

The movie Courage Under Fire portrayed several controversial aspects of the military, as well as problems people fact in their day-to-day life. It started out with Lt. colonel Starling who gave orders to fire at a tank that he thought was the enemy. He ended up being involved in friendly fire and deals with the PTSD of the event throughout the whole movie, which includes nightmares and flashbacks. He isn’t able to finally face his demons until he sits and tells the complete truth about what happened to the parents of the man whom he killed. I think that even if they hadn’t forgiven him completely he would have felt a huge burden lifted for telling the truth. A story that parallels his is the woman (captain Walden) he is investigating for the Medal of Honor. Interviews of her crewmembers that survived were all extremely different. Some said she was a coward, some said she was a hero. When you finally find out the truth, you learn that she did her best to control the situation she was in and her crew abandoned her. When Lt. colonel Starling was interviewing the soldiers he did it as a cognitive interview. He would make them start from the beginning and ease into the story, trying to make them feel more comfortable in it. The soldiers all suffered PTSD. None of them could deal with what they had done to their captain. The man who tried to take over command ended up committing suicide. He was either protecting himself or he could not deal with what he had done. He not only disrespected and underestimated her, but he was ultimately the one who killed her. Iliaro was played by Matt Damon, and had been a close companion of Captain Walden. He was extremely guilt stricken, when he was being interviewed he experienced retrieval inhibition, a technique that made it so that he could still live with himself. This was broken when he told the full story at the end of the movie, which was a collaboration of every story told. This just shows how different eyewitness memory can be, regardless if they change it because they legitimately don’t remember, or if they are trying to protect someone/themselves. Substance abuse was another common way the soldiers would ‘self medicate’. Stearling was addicted to alcohol, Ilario worked in a military pharmacy and would shoot up, and Altameyer (another soldier) was dying of stomach cancer and would self medicate by pushing a button to release medicine. Overall I really liked this movie, it had a good story line and kept me guessing. I also like the way it portrayed women as being able to handle combat.

Key words: retrieval inhibition, cognitive interview, PTSD, substance abuse, suicide, nightmares, flashbacks, stereotypes, eyewitness memory, retrieval

Courage Under Fire directly deals with how no eyewitness account is the same regardless of the number of people who saw the same event. There are many conditions that can affect an eyewitness’s account. Obviously the case given from the movie is different than what eyewitnesses experience in the US because it is based in a foreign country and deals with war. They are also both alike in the sense that they both deal with the Manson criteria (certainty, view and attention). When Lt. Col. Serling starts to interview the crew who served with Captain Walden, he found that all of their stories had something in common, and that was that they were all missing a major detail. First, Serling interviews Ilario, he praises how strong willed Walden was. He also testifies what he remembers happening after their helicopter went down. When you experience something, your brain has a process called encoding which refers to gathering information and putting it in a form that can be held in memory. After encoding, your brain’s next task is storage, which refers to holding the encoded information in the brain over time. This means that when the whole ordeal was going down, each member’s brain was constantly trying to store memories of what was going on. Since there was so much going on at once, their memories may be sporadic or maybe less accurate. Every time Serling meets with one of the people involved in the matter, his questions call for the person to use their brain’s retrieval method in which the brain accesses and pulls out the stored information at a later time. The retrieval process shown in this movie could have been heavily affected by stress focus, which entails that arousal can lead to a vivid memory but the details of that memory can be very inaccurate and scattered. In the book, it describes scripts as widely held beliefs about sequences of actions that typically occur in particular situations. This is relatable to the movie because it deals with the army. In certain situations, the soldiers are trained to do things that would give them the best outcome. These situations are a very complicated and dense material to try to remember and keep them apart. The book also says that if information in our memory is lacking or insufficiently encoded, we often rely on scripts to fill in gaps in our memory. Before we know that the soldiers were making up parts of their stories, we could say that they were using scripts to fill in the missing parts of their memory of what happened. Monfriez also demonstrated cognitive dissonance when he told the helicopter pilot that Captain Walden was dead. Cognitive dissonance predicts that once you commit yourself to a particular course of action, you will become motivated to justify that course of action. As soon as he got on board the helicopter, he already knew what he was going to have to deal with but since he thought it was the right decision, it became the only option for him. Finally, it was very obvious that Serling was always given leading questions by the people at the White House. Leading questions are just questions with distinctive wording biased towards getting the desirable answer. When Serling was questioned about the friendly fire mishap, the man doing the interview asked him multiple leading questions in order to help save Serling’s job. This whole movie is a good example of chapter seven and eyewitness testimony. The eyewitness is the only person we can have trust in when there are no other witnesses to a crime.

Key terms: Eye witness, stress, scripts, encoding, storage, retrieval, Manson criteria, cognitive dissonance, leading question

The human capacity to for memory is nothing short of astounding. Something that is seen or heard for only seconds can often be recalled in the oddest moments. Yet the capability for it to be tampered with is also something to note as well. Think of the children’s game Telephone, you sit in a circle and someone has some sort of message and passes it on. As it goes around the message usually gets distorted because of some sort or encoding error and at the end you see how far off the message has become (or if you have a good group how close). At its core Courage under fire deals with how differently a group of people will interpret the same event. Which in a way is like Telephone, one person knows what happens but distorts it so everyone else tells a different story.
One point in the plot of the movie covers Sterling’s covered up Friendly-Fire incident. It is referenced a few times and you even see him stick to the cover story from the army. This of course would be a prime example of Cognitive Dissonance (and a bit of repression, but that will come later). Cognitive Dissonance of course is the idea that your idea (or story in this case) is the correct one and you go to further lengths to prove that it is right or the truth. Now the main plot of the story involves questioning multiple eye witnesses of a similar event. Now these witnesses were all part of Walden’s crew and witnessed her actions and death. Yet as the plot continues the continuity starts to err off in certain points. This is where the problems of relaying on eye witness testimony begin to show. As the chapter mentions while eye witness statements are often the tie that binds a case together, it might not always be one hundred percent accurate. In any given situation a person may have perfect view of the event, what about the environment they’re in? What if they’re in the cover of darkness and you see someone get mugged, the mugger could run right in front of you, but without the light you have no hope of seeing them!
Another relevant point that shows how statements can differ is through weapon focus. The idea is that someone in a situation involving a weapon will be focused on the weapon more than the person wielding it. If I recall correctly Sterling has a rather detailed memory of firing off shells from his tank from what I would presume to be years after being in an active combat zone. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch for a soldier to focus on the weapon that could do harm, like when Monfriez when he thought Walden was shooting at him. He saw the gun fire at him and reacted accordingly, which unfortunately ended badly for Walden. One final point about issues with memory can be the time passed between the witnessed event and the telling of it. As far as I can tell they never really state how long has passed since the attack but with errors of encoding, storage, or retrieval even the passing of a week could affect how an event is recalled.
Now Sterling wouldn’t have found all this out by just bluntly charging ahead, instead he uses a bit of cognitive therapy to get his answers. Most of the time (looking over the scene before Monfriez decides to drive in front of a train) Sterling uses a calming voice and simple questions to draw out memories of the events, and usually it works out well. He gets his answers, but as mentioned above they’re not really correct. The story Rady is told is what he believes, Walden destroys the tank but is killed by the enemy protecting them; which can go back to cognitive dissonance, but even though it’s not true you can’t really call it a lie. It is indeed false, but like in Rady’s case if he believes it to be true then it’s not a lie. Like the chapter mentioned if a witness is asked leading questions or in some way has their view on the statement changed it can very well change the outcome of the case!
The film also shows the ravages of PTSD and how those cope with it. Now there are many ways of coping, many of which are rather detrimental to your health physically and mentally and others much more cathartic. Sterling due to the guilt of the true knowledge of his friends death drinks his pain away. Others take drugs and withdraw or start lashing out and making rash decisions. Repression, which is the conscious effort to forget something happened is another way to cope with stress. Ilario kept up with Monfriez’s story even though he knew the truth. Yet we also see positive ways to release the stress. We see llario confess to what really happened and we see Sterling tell Boyars parents what really happened in the tank incident. It isn’t so much that just reveling the heavy knowledge they have that helps. It’s the even though somewhat cliché thought that talking about it makes its better. A big source of therapy is simple talk therapy, opening up on problems so that their weight doesn’t surmount and crush someone. To bring it all together there are many things that can be learned from an eyewitness testimony. Yet just like in the game telephone it just takes one thing to change for a memory to be completely different.
Terms: Encode,Storage,Retrieval, PTSD, Cognitive Dissonance, Cognitive Therapy, Talk Therapy, Repression, Weapon Focus, Eye Witness.

The movie, Courage Under Fire, had a lot of psychological concepts. One of the specific things that was important in this film was the concept of memory. On the side of law, I think the most important concept in this film was about eye witnesses. Right off the bat Serling says to his soldiers something about sleep deprivation, which could cause all sorts of side effects, and although it was not discussed, I think that could have played a role in what happened that night in the desert.
Memory is the process of encoding, storing, and retrieving information that people experience throughout life. It was clear that because of the fighting taking place, high adrenaline could have caused problems with any of these memory processes.
After showing what happened with the tanks on the night, Serling begins interviewing soldiers that were flying on the first helicopter that crashed. This was important because it gave the soldiers a chance to provide details of the events that had taken place during their accident. I thought it was interesting how well the crew of the helicopter answered the questions, and described what had happened. They had remembered almost every little detail from the gunshots of the M16 to the sounds of the planes and helicopters.
The next four people that Serling interviewed made the plot a lot more interesting. These people all had different stories that seemed to reflect their different views of what happened. It surprised me that the third man's story was so much different from the first two. I was confused at why any of them would be lying about it. I realized that they were not having any problems remembering what had happened but rather they were trying to cover up what really happened.
Another psychological concept in this movie was the PTSD, that almost all of these soldiers were going through. Monfriez not only lied about the memories he had, but his PTSD of what he had done haunted him, and when Serling found out someone was lying it caused Monfriez to choose to commit suicide rather than face the negative consequences. Serling also went through PTSD of his battle, where he blew up one of his best friend's tanks.
Substance abuse was another key aspect in this film, that reflected the problems of the PTSD, and the memories that haunted these soldiers. Serling used alcohol to try and help with his stress disorder. His General knew that he had a drinking problem which means that his alcohol issues were affecting his daily functioning. This can be known as social functioning. It appeared that Ilario also had a substance abuse problem, in which he shot heroin in between his toes. I am not sure if this began before or after he returned from the war.
Serling also appeared to be having problems re-adjusting to being back home with his family. His PTSD, caused him to keep having flashbacks to the night of February 25. It was interesting to see how after he had figured out what had happened with Walden, and talked to Boylars' parents, he was able to finally go home peacefully and enjoy the company of his wife. All of theses soldiers had painful flashbacks of the trauma they had gone through. This is a common symptom of PTSD.
Eye witness was another key concept in this movie. This was important because Serling was relying on eye-witnesses to figure out what happened to Walden, and whether or not she deserved the Medal of Honor. There were instances of high adrenaline effecting the memories, for instance they were able to focus in clearly on weapons being fired and sounds of machinery. It was also important to see how the eye-witness stories did not match up, and that was how Serling ended up finding out the truth.
I thought it was interesting how even though they were all facing psychological problems, none of them were seeking out counseling to help. They were all trying to repress their memories of what they had been through. I think it would have been more beneficial, if they would have sought out a therapist, or clinical psychologist at a VA hospital.

Terms: memory, eye witness, PTSD, disorder, substance abuse, social functioning, repress, encode, store, and retrieve.

Loved the movie! I figured I wouldn’t like it since I’m usually not a fan of war movies (I don't like the gore and depressing settings), but I like how this one wasn’t completely centered around combat and killing, but instead had more of a “Law and Order” vibe. I wanted to touch on a few terms involving memory and eyewitnesses that I picked out from the book, and show how they can be seen in the movie.

First thing that stood out to me was the number of estimator variables that affected these eyewitnesses. Estimator variables are categorized as factors affecting an eyewitness memory that are out of the court’s control. In the case of the Black Hawk crew, the events they were asked to recall were part of high-stress and life-threatening situations, which I’m sure also involved aspects of weapon focus. Looking at Table 7.1 in the book, we know that when individuals are put under high-stress situations, this has a negative effect on their encoding process, making their memory a little foggy and their stories less reliable.

Expanding further on the Black Hawk crew interview, I believe I can loosely relate the post-identification feedback effect to this. This term is described as a distortion of eyewitness memory based on receiving biased feedback. I feel that as Sterling was interviewing the crew, they were really struggling to recall their story (probably because of estimator variables like I stated in the earlier paragraph!). As Chelli was trying to recall the events, it seemed as though he and the other soldiers were using positive feedback from each other (“Yes, I remember that too!” or “You’re right, that did happen!”) to fill in the blank parts of their memory, almost like they were feeding off of each others' comments. In my opinion, I thought this was the interview that involved the most psychology aspects from the textbook, compared to the other soldiers Serling talked to.

Illario’s interview was quite interesting too. The textbook term that stuck out to me while listening to him was cognitive dissonance. While the book relates this more to identification and line-ups, I looked at it more in a general sense. While Illario wanted Serling to believe his original story, it seemed as though he was also trying to convince himself that it was true. It was as though he was almost trying to repress the original memory and attempt to unconsciously transfer this more heroic Walden story into it, most likely because of feelings of shame or guilt. This, while mixed with him never being in combat before (causing more stress and weapon focus) explains some discrepancies in his story.

Last thing I wanted to touch on involves the Interview of Sterling to cover up the friendly fire incident and save his job. It was clearly obvious that system variables were coming into effect here. These are described as factors of eyewitness memory that are able to be controlled by the justice system. In terms of this interview, these variables are negative, because it’ s clear the interrogator is asking Sterling biased questions, attempting to mislead him, and trying to get him to change his story. This part of the movie shows how the justice system can use system variables to their advantage, either to uncover the truth or hide it.

Also, I feel like an attempt at unconscious transference was happening during the interview, not by Sterling, but by the interrogator. He was repeatedly asking him suggestive questions, and, at one point, just flat out told him what his memory should be (that it was difficult to tell if it was an enemy tank, etc.) which is extremely biased. While the tactics used by the interviewer were unsuccessful at changing Sterling’s memory, it did have an effect on him, by making him repress the memory and keep quiet.

In summary, the movie was really interesting. It was easy to see how psychology tied into the events and interviews, and the truth got distorted very quickly because of this.

Key Terms: Estimator Variable, Weapon Focus, Encoding, Post-Identification Feedback Effect, Cognitive Dissonance, Unconscious Transference, System Variable, Script

Courage Under Fire has many aspects of psychology in it, which are primarily centered around memory and the eyewitness testimony of the crew members involved in the incident. Another major aspect in the movie that relates to psychology is post-traumatic stress disorder. Every surviving member of Captain Walden’s crew shows signs of PTSD and Colonel Serling also has PTSD over the incident where he accidentally fired on a friendly tank and killed one of his friends.

Memory has three component processes. Those processes are encoding, storage, and retrieval. During the movie, various characters have particular difficulty with retrieval. While Serling is interviewing the surviving crews of the Blackhawk and Walden’s team, all of their stories differ in some way or another. This is likely due to a retrieval error mostly in both crews, but due to how the Blackhawk crew describes their view of the events, some of the discrepancies in their story could also be due to encoding errors, as they were being fired upon at the time and were most likely still disoriented from the crash of their helicopter. While Serling is interviewing the Blackhawk crew at the beginning of the movie, I felt that they may have been influencing each other’s recall of the event, displaying post-identification feedback. While they are recounting how the event happened, they seem to be having issues and rely on the positive feedback that the rest of the crew gives to determine what they are remembering correctly. This interview also shows how stressful conditions can negatively affect a person’s recall of events.

As I said earlier, while Serling is interviewing the varying members of Walden’s crew, their stories differ from one another. This can be due to many factors, one of which is the PTSD that they all clearly suffer from because of the event. One of the concepts that I feel is best demonstrated by the interviews with Ilario and Monfriez however is cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is when you commit yourself to a particular course of action and you become motivated to justify that course of action. In the initial interviews with Ilario, he paints Captain Walden as a fearless leader and hero, while Monfriez claims the opposite, saying that the Captain was a coward. I believe that Ilario wanted to convince himself that the Captain died of her own choice, because she was a hero, which slightly reflects what actually occurred. Due to this, his previous interactions with the Captain during the incident became distorted and more grandiose and heroic than they actually were when he was asked to recall what happened. I also believe that Monfriez wanted to believe that the Captain was a poor leader and that he was in the right during the incident. Due to this, all of Monfriez’s recall of the incident painted the Captain as a coward, as Monfriez tried to justify his actions to himself.

While Serling is interviewing both the crew of the downed Blackhawk and the members of Walden’s crew, he is conducting cognitive interviews. I feel that this is best represented by when he is interviewing Walden’s crew members. Serling tries to make sure that they are calm, and lets them tell their interpretation of what happened to him, not asking any leading questions during the story but instead recording their response for future review. If he has questions, he waits until they are finished and asks them to elaborate on the part that he was confused about. The best example of this during the movie is the issue of when the M-16 ran out of ammo, which came up during each interview.

Another thing that I want to review is the initial interview of Serling at the beginning of the movie about how he accidentally fired on a friendly tank. While being interviewed, it is clear that the interviewer is being biased about how the event occurred and shows that they are going to cover up the real event to save face with the public. I feel that the interviewer shows strong examples of leading questions/comments and system variables. The interview is very controlled and the interviewer is fishing for a specific response from Serling.

Overall, I enjoyed Courage Under Fire very much. It was a good movie and it also showed many examples related to cognitive psychology, memory, and clinical psychology.

Terms: PTSD, memory, eyewitness testimony, cognitive psychology, memory, clinical psychology, encoding, storage, retrieval, post-identification feedback, stress, cognitive dissonance, cognitive interview, bias, leading question/comment, system variable

Many of aspects of this film covered things that I have read in the book Forensic and Legal Psychology. One of the main points that I want to talk about in this post that really related to what I have studied in Psychology and Law was at the beginning of the movie when Nat Serling and his team accidently blew up a tank of their own. Serling had called to fire, so he really had a hard time dealing with deaths and explosion of the other team, especially because it was a close friend of him that had died because of his actions. Many war victims develop post traumic stress disorder, otherwise known as PTSD which is involved with clinical psychology. There are four criteria for PTSD which includes:
1) Re-experiencing of the event. The movie shows the Staff Sergeant going back and replaying the memory many times, in his memory he re-visioned the accident and also heard noises of the explosion, sensation and perception psychology.
2) Avoidance of stimuli associated with the event. To avoid stimuli associated with the event he was placed at a desk job afterwards.
3) Heightened arousal or hypervigilance. Nat Serling woke up several times during the night, having nightmares, and fear of the situation he was placed in.
4) Persistent symptoms that last more than a month. Sterling symptoms had last over six months, even when he got placed at a desk job he still had flashbacks and was facing depression. The movie also showed him turning to alcohol a lot after the incident.
He had a hard time lying about what really happened over there. He was not pleased with himself for not telling the truth to his friend’s parents and I believe that was something he had an internal battle dealing with. From the beginning to the end of the movie we saw him dealing with personal issues over the situation of making a call to accidently blow up one of their own vehicles. His problem did not fade away until the end of the film when he let out the secret he’d been keeping from his friends parents and told them the truth of what happened that night. His confession to them cleared his conscience, which relieved him of the burden he was carrying. I think that after he released it, he was able to move on in a somewhat better manner and start to enjoy life again. After this situation he should receive counseling to help him overcome the rest of his PTSD.
After this situation Serling was put on desk duty and was assigned to investigate if Karen Walden should get the Medal of Honor. During his interview process everyone has different stories. This is something that we just recently learned about in class about eyewitness testimony. At first it may appear that the crew maybe was delusional and maybe something during the process of their encoding, storage, or retrieval went wrong. Since it had also been about six months after the fact their memory trace could be deteriorated. But really they were all just lying in order to cover the real story. Nat Serling interrogated/interviewed all of the soldiers on the plane that went down. They all had false confessions, a good idea would have been to use a lie detector test on each of them as soon as he had a suspicion they were lying. Lie detection devices monitor physiological changes. The polygraph writes out many physiological responses to questions asked by an examiner.
Specialist IIario who was the medic, saw the actual thing but I believe that he tried to convince/commit himself into believing the made up story. Once he emerged himself into that lie then he became motivated to justify that course of action, this is what we call cognitive dissonance. Staff sergeant monfriez on the other had was the one that ultimately made IIario lie. He knew that what he did was wrong and ended up committing suicide because of his actions. Also, both of these men selectively retrieved only some aspects of the scene, and that phenomenon is referred to as retrieval inhibition.

Key terms-retrieval inhibition, lie detection, polygraph, cognitive dissonance, post traumatic stress syndrome, sensation, perception, clinical psychology, false confessions, eyewitness testimony

This movie and others like it give us unique insight into the world of how war truly does affect the mental state of people, even those who seems to be handling it just fine. This movie, from a clinical standpoint, has a lot to offer simply looking at the symptoms and characteristics of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It seems that everyone in the film has a serious case of PTSD from this incident that they are all forced to recall and relive for the interest of the investigation being held by Colonel Seerly. It’s interesting to examine all of the different scenarios the soldiers reported at what points in the investigation, and how their personal ideas and feelings toward Captain Karen Walden were expressed within their recollections.
The first story you hear is of the men in the tank that got shot because of Colonel Seerly’s orders to fire. During this scene all of the men are together when interviewed, and can feed off of and dispute one another’s memories. This creates an interesting social dynamic because men in the military that have fought together in life and death situations tend to stand together even if one of them was wrong. So when they’re being questioned, and the questions are incredibly leading, which as we know can alter a person’s memory, it is unlikely that they would contradict one another because they are interviewed together.
Now if they were interviewed separately, without the pressure of all of the other men there together, they might have had slightly different stories. Just like the superior to Colonel Seerly states, “no two eyewitnesses ever tell it exactly the same.” This leads to the discussion of the other soldiers who were in the helicopter. Since they were interviewed separately, they had the opportunity to tell the tale exactly how they recalled it, or at least in the way that they wanted to remember it. For example, the medic that went along who was in love with Karen, he recalled her being constantly calm and heroic under pressure. This could be a simple matter of perception and biology. In that level of high stress situation, your adrenaline is coursing through your body so anyone who doesn’t look as strained and excited as you feel, is going to appear calm. The other factor of how he saw the Captain was his perception of her as a person. They were in love, and those feelings would definitely lead you to see the best side in someone, especially when you were afraid that one or both of you would be dead in the morning.
This is a rather stark contrast to the character of Monfreeze. Monfreeze seems to object to her having power over him anyways, and then to add those negative feelings to a stressful situation in which he felt he should have had power, would lead him to perceive her as a weak and cowardly person in comparison to his self believed mocho personality. He also suffers from PTSD, and you see this when he commits suicide, but you don’t learn the reason for this until nearly the end of the film. This reason of course is because he’s the one who shot Karen, and ultimately killed her by telling the rescue team that she was already dead. The idea of having to cope with the knowledge that you alone are the reason someone else is dead, can be extremely mentally taxing, as is evident by the actions of not only Monfreeze, but also how Colonel Seerly turns to alcohol in order to help him forget that he killed his friend Tom.

Terms: personality, adrenaline, perception, biology, PTSD, leading question, clinical

The movie Courage Under Fire shows many aspects of Chapter 7 about eyewitness memory and testimony. The movie begins with a scene in which the main character, Serling, mistakenly fires on his own tank, killing one of his friends. It is later when he is being interviewed about the event that we can see many points from this chapter being played out. First, in the interview it is being audio recorded. This takes me back to the chapter's point in which video recordings are used to improve an eyewitness's accuracy. During Serling's recount the officer asking the question seemed to being trying to lead Serling into saying things so that the recording didn't sound as bad. He was pointing out estimator variables, like it was dark and smokey, that might affect Serling's perception of the event. These variables can effect a person's encoding of the event, leading them to misinterpret the information around them. All through out the movie Serling is dealing with the memory of this even and we see it physically affecting him.

The rest of the movie entails Serling working on the case of Captain Walden, whose helicopter was shot down trying to rescue a group of soldiers and whose actions saved their lives. She ended up not making it back and Serling is tasked at finding out just what happened from the eyewitness accounts and has to determine whether or not Walden should be awarded the Medal of Honor for her actions. Through out this process I am reminded of the Mason Criteria, which tries to judge the level of accuracy and trust-ability of eyewitness accounts.

Serling's first task is interviewing the group of soldiers that Walden and her crew had saved. It seemed the men could retrieve their stored memories of that night very well and seemed to be going off each other. Some recalled the M-16 fire and some did not. This reminds me a lot of social psychology in that when people don't really know what to do or say they will look to those around them. That is why it is good to interview witnesses separately so their accounts do not effect each others. This is a system variable that could have been kept under control.

Next, Rady, Walden's co-pilot, is interviewed. Rady was injured in the attack and said that Walden saved his life and was a hero. The fact of being injured during the event could cause this man to have retrieval inhibition in that he could remember certain things and not others. He remembered only what was happening to him immediately surrounding his injury, which can lead to bias.

Serling then talked to Ilerio, the medic. His account didn't quite agree on when the M-16 ran out. Perhaps estimator variables like stress and fear played a role in his encoding process. However, he did repeat that Walden acted without fear or doubt. This could be a script that he was relying on because leaders are supposed to act this way in these situations. It was also said that this was his first time in combat, which makes me think that the weapon focus effect may have been at work here. Ilerio may have been focusing on the firing and his life being at risk more than other events around him.

Monfries was on of the last important eyewitness's to be interviewed. From his account he said that Walden was a coward and seemed very bitter about it. He also seemed to be lying and said that with all his adrenaline pumping he couldn't be asked to remember everything. This makes me think of biopsychology and the different endorphins acting upon the brain and how they affect the encoding, storing , and retrieval process. However, Serling's leading and suggestive questions did end in some truth coming out of Monfries.

All in all this movie had a lot to do with eyewitness accounts and memory. It also had aspects of social psychology in how people interact and think when in a group. Biopsychology was also apparent, as well as personality and mental disorders, such as PTSD.

Terms: Encoding, Storage, Retrieval, Scripts, Video Recordings, Mason Criteria, Retrieval Inhibition, Weapon Focus Effect, Social Psyc, Biopsych, Personality

I'm not really a big fan of war movies, especially ones based on reality. Just the thought saddens me, but it does change you're emtions and gives you a better understaning. I had never seen Courage Under Fire before but I thought it was good. As I watched it reminded me of various crime shows I've seen on TV, how you need good eyewitness testimonies to get down and figure out what really happened in a crime or some other traumatic event. This movie really shows you how groups of people really interpret the same event they were all present at. This really relates back to the last chapter we read in our textbooks, how a good memory is very key to a credible testimony. The process of memory is placed into three main steps. Encoding, which is the gathering of the information. Storage, which holds the encoded information in the brain over time. And then there is retrieval, which allows one to access stored information at a later period of time. The war scenes in the movie display a lot of encoding and encoding errors. For example, when Colonel Sterling is commanding the tank troops to start firing and that pretty much ends up leading to a major disaster. It doesn't help that all the sodiers were very sleep deprived and that affects their focus and high kicks of adrenaline affected their recollection of the chain of events.

Another psychological concept I would like to point out from the movie is that all the soldiers suffered from severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Courage Under Fire shows us how one can cope with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, even though some soldiers succumb to its sometimes gruesome side effects. Colonel Sterling consumes too much alcohol to numb away his pain felt to cope with the true death of his friends. Monttriez displays his suffering of Post Traunatic Stress Disorder by trying to avoid the situation but I begins to get to him and later he takes his own life from the stress of it all, all the guilt from saving his own behind and not his friend,while Altameyer is pent up in the hospital numbing hinmself with pain killers. All the fighing in the movie ith the soldiers really shows how important a good memory is and relates to gathering valid eyewitness testimony. For example, Colonel Sterling interviewed everyone in the plain and they all gave false testimonies.

Another concept to psychologically look at is the weapon focus effect. Someone in a dangerous situation is going to focus on the weapon held more than the person wielding the gun so they are'nt going to have a clear memory of the culprits face. In the movie, Sterling has a very vivid recollection of firing shells from his own tank. Also evident when Montriez thought Walden was shooting at him.

Courage Under Fire, I feel teaches you a lesson about trying to get the help you need even if you are struggling and don't think you deserve the help. And the validity of a good witness testimnoy when gathering inforamtion after a crime or other traumatic events.

In the movie Courage Under Fire, a military rescue has taken place and is under investigation to get the truth about what has really happened on February 25th. Toward the beginning of the movie, Nat Sterling, Denzel Washington’s character, is interviewing a group of soldiers who were witnesses to the specific event that took place. They were all gathered in the same room, they kept answering the questions with they were not sure, and they really could not see what was going on. But when they mentioned about weapons being fired at the end of the rescue, one man said that the way those shot sounded the weapon being used had to be a M18. After this was mentioned another soldier also agreed with the soldier who mentioned it, he said he heard the same thing. When first watching this scene it seemed like the second soldier who agreed was not too sure if he really did hear the same thing. The second soldier had said something along the lines of “now that I think about it, I heard it too, it sounded like a M18. I felt like this section related to chapter sevens section about suggestive commenting. This means that his memory could have changed, or altered, because another soldier had mentioned a weapon.
Sterling was assigned the investigation, he went around searching for the rescue team that had been directly involved. While he was doing his investigation, he started to think and receive flashbacks, which happened that very same day, February 25. He accidently blew up one of his own, well the military owned tanks. He could not remember exactly what had happened, how it happened, every time he thought about it all he saw was his friend burning. I think unconsciously he suppressed the memory of what had happened and when he tried to consciously remember he could not trigger it. This is where I believe to see cognitive psychology playing a role in this movie. Consciously aware of his actions, of what he had order to be done, he soon felt guilty and began to think what he could have done to prevent this. We can see he is struggling with this because of his actions and body language. He is distant from his family, he does not want to talk to his wife about it, and he has become an alcoholic. Social psychology is an aspect of this movie also, because of the way Sterling and the other soldiers are dealing with the people around them.
When introduced to Monfriez we see him yelling at a soldier “you never leave a man behind” this was an important scene but was unknown at the time, it will foreshadow a later scene. When he finally decides to give Sterling his cooperation and tell his side of the story, Sterling seems very confident. Because of his confidence the audience is to believe Ilario was lying because he wanted his captain to receive the honorary award. His confidence, perception psychology, was but into play he story was to be believed accurate, until his body language had given that he was lying about something when questioned about the M18. The cognitive psychology has played a huge role in this movie, the cognitive part being how Monfriez and Ilario had altered their memory of what happened that day. Once they had altered their memory and given their false story, they had become somewhat convincing that their story were the truth, the only thing that kept Sterling investigating was the fact that they did not have matching stories and both became slightly nervous when asked about the M18. Body language was helpful during the movie; it had showed the social psychology aspect of the movie. When Monfriez had been scene for a second time by Sterling, and Sterling had mentioned he went to go see Altamayer, Monfriez hesitated to turn around. When they were in the car you could tell when seeing Monfriez’s face and listening to his tone he was about to do something crazy.
Matt Damon’s character Ilario had a few problems of his own, while experiencing the cognitive and social aspect of psychology he was also experiencing biopsychology. Toward the end of the movie, Sterling had said that they had looked in Ilario’s locker and found the drugs he was doing. Ilario had turned to neurotics to keep him sane. He wanted to forget what they had done; he wanted to numb his feelings and emotions. His perception had also played a part in his guilt. He tried to justify them leaving the captain, he said that even if they had went back for her she would have died with the gunshot wound she had.
After Sterling had finally received the truth, He had a meeting with the reporter who found the unknown tape of what happened during Sterling’s event. Once receiving verification that the clearly followed protocol, Sterling had gone to talk to his friends parents. Here is another aspect of social psychology because what Sterling had to explain to the parent that he was the one who gave the order that caused his son’s death, and delivering this news had to be in a delicate situation.

Terms: Cognitive, Social, Perspective, Behavior, Bio psychology, Sensation- Psychology, Suggestive Comment, Investigation

It’s clear that several concepts of psychological memory come in to play during the movie Courage under Fire. Specifically, in terms of eyewitness memory, the factors influencing such memory such as mental load, stress, and its retrieval. Further, the movie even incorporates some aspects of the interview/interrogation process and the problems and psychological aspects that questioning a suspect, or in this case soldiers brings up.
The very first interview, following the first combat scene is the very first glimpse of the psychological influence in terms of memory, along with aspects of interrogation. The character Nat Serling (played by Denzel Washington) had fired on friendly forces, resulting in fatalities. During the following interview we could see a classic depiction of encoding and the problems associated with it. Firstly, due to the fact it was a combat scenario there would have been a fairly high level of stress leading to problems. Further, due to the fact they would have been in immediate danger, decisions would have to be made fairly quickly, distorting time and the ability to make more rash decisions. As the film depicts it ended up being a friendly they fired upon however at the time Nat Serling would have been more focused on the immediate threat of death rather than evaluating in great detail the suspect. In this case his immediate mental load led him to focus in on what he thought was an enemy tank (the danger) rather than focusing on identifying characteristics of the tank. Although this seems like a bit of an extrapolated explanation of a psychological concept it is more than true. Even though it was depicted in a rather covert and military way the movie clearly was depicting the weapon focus effect. The ability to identify the assailant (the friendly tank) was obscured by the situational factors and the weapon (aka being fired upon.)
The interview process that Nat Serling went through after the first scene also reveals some more interesting aspects that continue through the plot of the movie. Although Nat becomes cleared of all wrong doing he still states that “no matter the situational factors he should have known it was a friendly.” However the interviewer leads Nat to believe that due to the smoke, and environment “he could not have known it was a friendly from a foe.” Through the movie Nat struggles with this turning to alcohol, and frequently flashing back to memories during his dreams. It’s possible it was beginning symptoms of PTSD however more interesting is why Nat begins thinking in this manner. During the interview he received biased feedback that what he did was in the right, when he indeed knew that although it was found to be just that his actions were wrong. As a result the interviewer planted the false memory into his head leading him to doubt himself, and to distort what he actually saw and encoded. As a result his ability to recall what he actually witnessed becomes more and more distorted, and leads to more and more self-doubt. This is all evident of the post identification feedback effect, because only after the military interviewer informed him that “you would not have known friend from foe do to the situational factors.” Did he begin to doubt and succumb to PTSD like symptoms.
Nat then goes on to investigate the possible Medal of Honor recipient. Starting first with interviewing a collective group of soldiers who were present when Karen Walden’s helicopter went down during their attempted rescue. This portrayed a few factors of bad interrogation such as questioning all of them at once. As a result this could have led to a sense of group-think in which all soldiers stuck to the same explanation of events. Interviewing them all at once also could have led to gaps or misrepresentation of the soldier’s individual memories of events rather than the recall of the collective group. This became more evident as Nat Serling began interviewing individually Walden’s team and inconsistencies in the soldier’s story began to appear.
The most interesting part of the movie was the interview between Nat Serling (Denzel Washington) and a member of Walden’s crew Monfriez (Lou Diamond Phillips.) during the interview there is again aspects of the interrogation process. Monfriez attempts to inform Nat to let the case go, and to push the medal through. However, he is informed that Nat can’t do that and he wants to get to the bottom of things. Nat does a good job of recording the interview for documentation, (because his memory is also not perfect) and by asking open-ended questions of Monfriez. During the interview past stories in which Nat had heard become inconsistent. When asked why Monfriez lied he stated “we thought that’s what Washington wanted to hear.” This is a common problem among witnesses attempting to tell the interviewer or officials of authority what they want to hear.
Monfriez’s interview also provides insight into inconsistences with past interviews of Walden’s crew. Things they stated such as what they heard or saw according to Monfriez were incorrect. Such as the hearing of the m16 fire, and the portrayal that Karen Walden was a hero. This may have been due to the fact that many of the soldiers interviewed stated they had never been to combat before. Due to this revelation it became clear that they could have been relying on predetermined beliefs about what should happen in a war zone, or scripts. Only after they were actually a part of physical combat, multiple stressors, and immediate danger did they come to realize they had lacking information which lead to insufficient encoding. Then upon questioning they continued stating what they thought figures of authority wanted to hear, leading to weak witness confidence and cognitive dissonance. As a result the soldiers became motivated to justify their course of action, going as far as running away in attempt to preserve their altered explanation of events.
Consequently Monfriez’s interview was the most influential in terms of witness memory and the interrogation process. He had high confidence in his responses and followed his own judgment. He enlightened Serling’s character to the fact that other soldiers were telling him what he wanted to hear, and represented the fact that every witness has a different account of events, and some are much better then others. The interview process was unbiased through recordings, and open ended questions. As a result through his interview he provided a broader spectrum to the other aspects of psychology present throughout the movie, and led to the development of the rest of the investigation. Although other parts of the movie involved psychology this interview put all the basic ideals into perspective in a rather holistic nature in terms of Serling’s investigation and the influence of psychology.

Terms: encoding, mental load, stress, retrieval, weapon focus effect, post identification feedback effect, open-ended questions, scripts.

This movie covers many different aspects of memory; different characters faced the challenge of recalling what had happened during the attack on February 25th. This causes a lot of confusion between characters and everyone ends up giving out some kind of a misinterpretation of the information. I can understand why things would get scrambled just because of how horrifying the event was in the first place. Being that this event was a horrific one we can see that the storage and the retrieval of the events may be a hard one for the survivors to come by because it was a gruesome event.

From watching the film in class on Tuesday I feel as if I can only recall a few scenes of the movie where everyone’s memory was scrambled. One part of the movie I remember correctly is where Lt. Col. Sterling is put on an assignment where he has to investigate on Karen Walden, who is a candidate for the Medal of Honor. Sterling has to be put to the test by interviewing the survivors of the fallen helicopter Black Hawk during the battle in Iraq (desert storm). With this being said he carries a tape recorder everywhere he goes and to every interview he conducts to make sure his memory of what people said was not being tampered with, which is a great idea because like we know by taking this class evidence being said can easily be translated into different things and could be tampered with if things are not recorded or written down by the interviewer.

One of the main scenes that memory can be tampered with is the scene where every survivor from the Black Hawk is in one room and evidence is being stated. Everyone put in this room was an eyewitness to the event that had taken place in Iraq, so everyone had their own opinion of what went on. Everyone could hear each other’s stories and everything could easily be turned around and it could somehow change people’s thinking and turn their evidence around, but they continue with the interview. If things were done right, they should have taken each one into a separate room with Sterling so he could get the full story one by one instead of having everyone in the same room. This may have created a more accurate finding of evidence.

Another huge scene where memory comes into play is where Sterling and Ilario, played by Matt Damon, are sitting next to the pool chatting about what had happened that night/day when the helicopter was shot down to see if he has any other information about it all. His memory of what happened was grainy it seemed like, just because he could not remember what he said about the time of day that the shots were fired. Sterling had asked him again what time of day it was that they went off and he could not remember what he said in the first place, so was he unsure the first time or was he just not able to remember it?
We all know that being put in a room with many people can tamper evidence but so can asking close ended questions. Sterling did the right thing by asking open ended questions to get information out and not by putting information in. By putting information into someone’s mind it can change their outlook on what really happened. This would be bad since they are trying to find out if Walden is actually a good candidate for the Medal of Honor.

Because I did not catch the ending of the movie these were the only few spots of the film that I really saw areas of memory either being tampered with or being true.

Another thing that could have happened to change people’s memory around would be the fact that everything happened in a quick fashion that time would have elapsed so quickly for them, and trying to retrieve information about the event was probably stressful in some way shape or form just because everything happened so fast. This event must have caused some kind of trauma on the “soldiers” that were in the movie. Yes, it is just a movie but if we look at it from a real perspective we can assume that some people could have been messed up emotionally, this is where I think PTSD would come up and a social psychologist might have been used to help talk it out with the “soldier.”

KEY TERMS: Storage, retrieval, memory, eyewitness, social psychologist, PTSD, stress, time consideration

We are supposed to link this movie to the concept of memory, and there are plenty of factors related to memory and eyewitness testimony. But… I feel like the problems of misinformation and conflicting stories was not due to memory deficits or social influence. All of the witnesses knew the truth of what they saw, but they deliberately changed their story for different reasons. For the sake of staying on topic, I’ll talk about factors related to memory.

When Serling and Patela were fighting in Al Bathra, there were many conditions that could have interfered with both their perception and memory. First of all, they had been awake for 48 hours. Psychological research tells us that sleep deprivation can inhibit your perception, concentration, judgment, motor skills, and memory. Second, it was nighttime, and foggy. Darkness is going to limit how far and how clearly you can see, and fog obviously hinders perception as well. There were constant red and green lights flashing in different directions, which probably distracted them from their focus point, especially after their eyes had adjusted to the nighttime. There were also lots of explosions, fires, and smoke, all making it more difficult for Serling and Patela to accurately see who they were shooting at. Patela said to Serling, “I think I see one!” referring to an enemy tank. He was never certain that the tank was an enemy, until they starting shooting at them (or so he thought). As we all know, it turns out that the tank was actually a US tank, and that of Serling’s dear friend.

Serling’s commander reassured him that under the circumstances – thermal equipment and burning tanks and smoke obscuring his visual ID – he couldn’t have been able to tell the difference between the enemy and US tanks. Now we could argue that the commander’s questions to Serling were suggestive and leading. This is not a good approach to questioning eyewitnesses as it could influence the memories they are trying to retrieve and falsely confirm a questionable piece of information. Retrieval inhibition happens when leading or suggestive comments make the witness retrieve only selective information. This inhibits recall of other aspects of a scene. However, Serling’s memory was accurate, even with the suggestive questions. In fact, he even said that he believed he should have known the difference between the enemy and US tanks. He probably said this because of the guilt and responsibility he felt for the death of his friend.

I also had a suspicion of PTSD with Serling. There were a few times in the movie when he would have vivid flashbacks of the events in Al Bathra. These intense memories distracted him from eating dinner and spending time with his family, as well as concentrating at work. He also had an intense dream of the same events, and awoke in a panic. We also some substance abuse – Serling consumed great amounts of alcohol, which seemed to calm him down after such dreams and flashbacks. The DSM criteria for PTSD includes: re-experiencing of the event, avoidance of stimuli associated with the event, heightened arousal, and persistent symptoms that last more than a month. He definitely re-experienced the event, through the flash backs and nightmares. I did not notice any avoidance of stimuli, but we also did not see his behavior every single day after the war. I would say he did have a heightened arousal, and used alcohol to subside it. I believe the majority of the movie took place about 6 months after the events, so he would meet the last criteria as well. PTSD and substance abuse obviously tie into clinical psychology.

The survivor troops from the Blackhawk gave an example of how social influence can contaminate eyewitness’s testimonies (this relates to social psychology). When the crew was talking about the M16 firing, one member said, “I heard it!” Immediately, another member responds, “I heard it too!” This is why eyewitnesses should be separated and instructed not to discuss the events with each other. Hearing someone else’s version of the event can interfere with your original memory, and cause you to believe that you saw the same thing as the other witness. Aside from this, the members of the Blackhawk were under several conditions that would interfere with accurate encoding and storage of memory. There were sleep deprived and under a great deal of stress – which both have a negative effect on the encoding of information. It was very dusty, impairing their ability to see a great distance, and they couldn’t actually see the Heuy when it was firing from the ground.

As I said earlier, I felt that the men on Captain Walden’s crew were not having difficulty remembering the events that took place, but rather deliberately telling their story in a favorable way. Ilario (Walden’s medic) spoke of Walden as a hero. He claimed that she never displayed any doubt or fear when she had to make life or death decisions. Monfriez, on the other hand, told a different version of his captain (the second time; when he claimed he was telling the truth). He said she was hysterical, cowardly, and wanted to retreat. To me, this doesn’t represent inaccurate memories. The two men obviously had different opinions of their captain. After putting together the whole story, Monfriez may have just made his story up because he was afraid of telling the truth – that he left Walden alone and claimed she was dead, just to selfishly save his own life. Perhaps he portrayed Walden as a coward to reduce cognitive dissonance. This is a social psychology term, meaning that we act to reduce the discomfort (dissonance) we feel when two of our thoughts (cognitions) are inconsistent. Monfriez’s actions of leaving Walden behind and claiming she was dead was a very selfish and dishonorable thing to do. But he did not think of himself as a selfish or dishonorable person. In order to reduce the discomfort of these conflicting thoughts, he may have convinced himself that Walden was a hysterical, cowardly captain who did not deserve to be saved. This would have made him feel better about the decision he made to abandon her.

Terms: memory, eyewitness, perception, sleep deprivation, encoding, storage, retrieval, retrieval inhibition, PTSD, DSM, cognitive dissonance, clinical psychology, social psychology

Courage under fire has many moments in it which refer to memory. Not only am I going to talk about the memories associated with the movie in general but then I am going to briefly describe memories that this movie brought up for me as I am a veteran of foreign wars as well.
So the movie starts off at the beginning of the Gulf war, We see our first case of memory issues when they are under fire and they misinterpret shots from an ally. The character who says that it is an enemy tank and is sure that it is, very quickly doesn’t remember if he actually saw what he thought he saw. Now I don’t believe this is an encoding failure or anything like that. During combat you react in a way that is drilled into you from training. When your under contact a lot of adrenaline builds up which as we know may cause that slowing down of time, and super analyzing certain points. What he wasn’t analyzing was wether that tank was a friendly or not. More than likely what he was analyzing was that tank is firing in a general direction towards us and I need to aim to fire back. Which would then lead to those awkward memories after the fact of did I realize it was an ally or not. Now not only does that cause those memories but the whole movie serling is affected by those memories of killing an ally. Those memories can play and play in someones head causing an undue amount of stress to anyone. There are better coping methods though than drinking. Now I want to point out that he didn’t actually have a memory of his friend burning in the tank( an often shown flashback) But what he was doing was picturing that death that had encoded into his memory using other stimuli to make a pretty accurate depiction of what probably happened.
Now Serling starts collecting data in regards to the medal of honor recipient. Almost everyone remembers the captain in some sort of favorable memory. Obviously the first crew to share their story remember the chopper in general saving their lives. With that being in mind a lot of those memories can be skewed in a normal situation due to that opinion of walden being favorable. Simply: they would glorify the situation a bit in regards to her actions not only because they feel like she should get the award but because they feel obligated towards her for saving their lives and giving up hers in the process.
One of the first issues brought up by the crew that was saved is they heard m16 gunfire, which in the movie was accurately put as they could tell the difference between an ak47, a m40 and a m16 and that’s true. I could easily tell the difference between them, and if they had been paying attention to the fighting noises they would have noticed ak47 (machine guns) m40(machine guns) and an m16( semi automatic) I suppose there was a pistol in there as well but pistols make an entirely different noise as well. It became an issue among the crew of the chopper medic team though because they all had different accounts of what happened.
The first witness was Rady. Rady was the copilot of the chopper, but he didn’t really remember much as he had been knocked unconscious before the crash happened. What little he did remember though again glorifies Walden, even if he has no idea what happened when they hit the ground. He would glorify her in his story because he survived from what he thought was her efforts and she died while in that process.
Next came Ilario the actual medic of the crew. Ilario thought that Walden also was very brave, however, this could easily have been because of his knowledge of her beforehand. They had been friends for sometime and his perception of her was probably pretty high and honorable. He viewed her as being a great soldier and with confirmation bias with the incident that only gave him a higher opinion of her because of her actions. Ilario didn’t want to speak about the incidents very much. Which is quite understandable not many people want to bring up those kinds of memories, we find later though that could have just been because of other things that actually happened that night. But ilario finishes his story with walden in high regards. He also cant remember if the m16 was out of ammo or not. Rather he either couldn’t remember or chose not to remember what actually happened with the m16.
Monfriez an E-6 in the army was the gunner for the chopper armed with the m40 machine gun. Someone who had previously seen action he understandably doesn’t want to talk about the incident. We learn though that what he told the reporters originally was different than his account of things. He perceived walden as a coward and that all her actions were second guessed or forced out of her unwillingly. Now it is pretty obvious that monfriez is very angry about what happened. Which also can affect your memories a lot. He is automatically going to put a negative side on things because he didn’t like the crew particurarly and he didn’t like walden. Understandable from an infantrymens position of not wanting to take orders from a female.
That’s all that I saw from the movie in class and was not able to watch the remainder of it. But it eventually leads to them having one final witness who due to him dying couldn’t relate all of his story either because he didn’t want to or was incapable of doing so. We eventually learn that everyone was lying about certain things. They purposely chose to lie about the events and make it sound better so they wouldn’t have to bring up the memories of them leaving walden behind lying about her being dead. Finally serling confronts his memories and tells his friends parents his role in their sons death.
We talked a lot about how certain feelings can affect memories. If you have a happier outlook on someone then your memories of them are going to be better, and you wont remember bad encounters as easily. Whereas if you remember the person poorly you will focus your memories on the negative things about that person. This is very well shown between ilario and Monfriez. I would also comment that watching this video actually made me tear up, because of brought up memories to me of friends of mine that died overseas. It actually was a painful movie to watch in regards to that area. But its also good to note that people given a certain stimulus(the movie in my case) can recall memories a bit easier. I don’t normally think about those times but this movie brought them up unwillingly. Same thing could be said for a trauma victim. If they don’t remember something about the incidident because they repress or choose not to remember those memories(also could be said about the crew of the chopper) certain stimulus can make them remember. If a trauma victim is blindfolded for instant, blindfolding them again could possibly help recall those memories. All of this can be linked to Social and cognitive psychology as it has to do with your perceptions of people and the way you encode, store and retrieve memories.
Encoding, memories, witness, trauma, recall, repress, stimulus, retrieve, store, confirmation bias, Social and Cognitive psychology.