Edexcel A2 Psychology - Criminal Psychology: Yuille and Cutshall

Yuille and Cutshall:

· The aim of the study was to look at the problems of laboratory research in studying eyewitness testimony, to look at the accuracy of eyewitness accounts and to compare eyewitness accounts taken straight after an incident with those taken four to five months after. Another aim was to see how eyewitness memory could be affected by leading questions.

· 20 out of 21 witnesses to a gun shooting which had taken place four to five months before were asked to take part in research. 13 agreed to take part in the research. Directly after the gun shooting, all 21 witnesses were interviewed by police. Four to five months after the initial interviews, the 13 participants were interviewed by researchers. The interviews followed the same style as the police interviews: the participants were asked to describe the event and were then asked questions about it. Two leading questions were added to the interviews, one asking about the thief’s car headlight (“did you see the broken headlight?”) and another asking about the car quarterpanel (“did you see the yellow quarterpanel?”). The headlight was not broken, and the quarterpanel was blue. Half of the participants were asked these leading questions, and the other half were asked non-leading variants (“did you see a broken headlight” and “did you see a yellow quarterpanel?”). The participants were asked about their emotional state and stress levels before and after the incident, and were also asked whether they had any problems afterwards. These results were recorded on a 7 point scale – 1 being perfectly calm and 7 being extremely anxious.

· The scoring procedure was very precise, so the police and research interviews could be compared. The…