Effects of perceived efficacy and prospect of success on detection in the Guilty Actions Test.

Two experiments were conducted in order to examine factors that might influence the motivation of guilty and informed innocent examinees to either cope or cooperate with the Guilty Actions Test. Guilty participants committed a mock-crime and informed innocent participants handled the critical items of the crime in an innocent context. In Experiment 1 the participants were led to believe that the prospects of being found innocent on the test were either high or low.

Serial reproduction of traumatic events: does the chain unravel?

Our goal in this paper is to show that a careful analysis of recall accuracy within a serial reproduction chain can add to a detailed qualitative analysis of the reproductions within the chain. The texts we chose are based on newspaper reports concerning current events, which are far from being mundane: reports of tragic events, even traumatic events. The participants were 216 students who were randomly assigned to 54 four-person reproduction chains, 18 for each of three 160-word texts.

Accurate, inaccurate and omitted details in collective emotional memories: the case of Itzhak Rabin's assassination.

Collective memory of the assassination of the former Israeli Prime Minister, Itzhak Rabin, was originally examined by asking 61 Israeli students, about two weeks after the assassination (T1) and about 11 months later (T2) to fill out an open-ended questionnaire about the assassination. About 13 years later (T3) a new sample of 80 students also filled out the memory questionnaire. In T2 and T3 the participants also self-assessed various emotional and cognitive variables about their memories.

Effects of coping and cooperative instructions on guilty and informed innocents' physiological responses to concealed information.

Previous research on the Concealed Information Test indicates that knowledge of the critical information of a given event is sufficient for the elicitation of strong physiological reactions, thus facilitating detection by the test. Other factors that affect the test's efficacy are deceptive verbal responses to the test's questions and motivation of guilty examinees to avoid detection. In the present study effects of coping and cooperative instructions - delivered to guilty and innocent participants - on detection were examined.

Credibility judgments of narratives: language, plausibility, and absorption.

Two experiments were conducted in order to find out whether textual features of narratives differentially affect credibility judgments made by judges having different levels of absorption (a disposition associated with rich visual imagination). Participants in both experiments were exposed to a textual narrative and requested to judge whether the narrator actually experienced the event he described in his story. In Experiment 1, the narrative varied in terms of language (literal, figurative) and plausibility (ordinary, anomalous).

Effect of personal involvement in traumatic events on memory: the case of the Dolphinarium explosion.

The association between memories of the terrorist explosion at the Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv and the level of personal involvement in the explosion was investigated. Memories of injured victims, uninjured eyewitnesses, and uninvolved controls who learned about the explosion from the mass media were compared. It was expected that memory of the explosion would be most and least detailed and accurate among the victims and the controls, respectively.

From theory to implementation: building a multidimensional space for face recognition.

The purpose of the present study was to empirically construct a multidimensional model of face space based upon Valentine's [Valentine, T. (1991). A unified account of the effects of distinctiveness, inversion, and race in face recognition.

Effects of stereotypes and suggestion on memory.

In this study, the interactive effect of stereotype and suggestion on accuracy of memory was examined by presenting 645 participants (native Israelis and immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia) with three versions of a story about a worker who is waiting in a manager's office for a meeting. All versions were identical except for the worker's name, which implied a Russian or an Ethiopian immigrant or a person of no ethnic origin. Each participant was presented with one version of the story.

Effects of prior knowledge and expert statement on belief in recovered memories: an international perspective.

We tested the hypothesis that beliefs in the purported attributes of recovered memories of child sexual abuse (CSA) are associated with knowledge of the "recovered/false memory debate", and that such beliefs will be related to assessments of the credibility of statements made by participants in a vignette about CSA. Participants from five countries (the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Israel) responded to a questionnaire regarding beliefs about recovered memory as well as self-reported exposure to and knowledge of the debate. In addition, they assessed the credibility of statements made by a daughter (reporting recovery of memories of sexual abuse by her father), her father (denying the allegation and accusing the daughter's therapist of implanting in her false "memories" of abuse), and two experts (each supporting one of the two protagonists).

Collaborative remembering of emotional events: the case of Rabin's assassination.

Individual and collaborative remembering of the assassination of Israel's Prime Minister, Itzhak Rabin, were compared. In line with previous laboratory findings on memory of neutral stimuli, it was hypothesised that collaborative remembering (three individuals reaching a common response) and nominal remembering (three individual responses pooled together) of the assassination would be more accurate than individual remembering. A total of 146 participants responded (115 individually and 120 in groups of three) to open-ended and multiple-choice questionnaires (among them, 89 responded twice with a week of intertest interval) about Rabin's assassination and the events that preceded and followed it.

Laterality in familiar face recognition: a meta-analysis.

An extensive series of experiments has recently led to the hypothesis that face recognition, which had been considered a right-hemisphere specialization, may actually be bilaterally processed in the two hemispheres. In the present study an attempt was made to solve the conundrum of the laterality of face recognition by performing a meta-analysis on studies of familiar face recognition. Results of six studies measuring reaction time of familiar face naming and of eleven studies measuring accuracy of familiar face naming were transformed to standard Z scores.

Distinctiveness in flashbulb memory: comparative analysis of five terrorist attacks.

The purpose of the present study was to find out whether a series of terrorist attacks, which share some common features, elicit flashbulb memories (of the personal circumstances in which the person first learned about these events) that are usually elicited by a single, unexpected, surprising, and personally important event. A total of 131 participants answered questions regarding details of five terrorist attacks that had taken place in Israel during the years 1995-1997. In addition, they assessed, for each of the five events, the number of overt rehearsals, and the degrees of emotional intensity, surprise, novelty, personal importance, and distinctiveness.

A serial test of the laterality of familiar face recognition.

The purpose of the present study was to address the issue of laterality of familiar face recognition. Seventy-two participants judged familiar faces presented laterally or centrally for their "faceness," familiarity, occupation, and name (which represent four stages of familiar face processing) using one of three response modes-verbal, manual, or combined. The pattern of reaction times (RTs) implied a serial process of familiar face recognition.

International variation in ethics committee requirements: comparisons across five Westernised nations.

Background: Ethics committees typically apply the common principles of autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence and justice to research proposals but with variable weighting and interpretation. This paper reports a comparison of ethical requirements in an international cross-cultural study and discusses their implications.

Discussion: The study was run concurrently in New Zealand, UK, Israel, Canada and USA and involved testing hypotheses about believability of testimonies regarding alleged child sexual abuse.

Effect of inversion on the recognition of external and internal facial features.

The purpose of the present study was to find out whether inversion affects recognition of external and internal facial features. 24 participants matched, under two experimental conditions (pair and multiple-choice matchings), upright target faces with three categories of facial test stimuli: full faces, external features and internal features, which were presented in either upright or inverted orientations. Data analysis showed that matching of facial stimuli was faster, more accurate and more consistent under upright than under inverted orientations for all stimulus categories; mostly for full faces, and least for internal features.