The effect of empathy on eyewitness memory
-
1
Southern Cross University, Psychology, School of Health and Human Sciences, Australia
Aims: Numerous factors have been identified that can influence eyewitness memory. These factors lead to an increased susceptibility to the misinformation effect, potentially resulting in critical errors in testimony. One other potential influencing factor may be empathy. Empathy is considered as the reactions of an individual to something another person is experiencing. Research has indicated empathy to be a multidimensional construct, combining cognitive and emotional concepts. Empathy has yet to be investigated as an influencing factor, therefore, the current research sought to examine the effect of empathy on eyewitness memory.
Method: Participants (n = 60) completed an online survey consisting of a short video, followed by reading a short narrative containing correct and misinformation. One group of participants (N=31) also received an empathy induction. They then completed empathy measures, a cued recall memory test and a recognition memory test. The memory test contained questions relating to the correct and misinformation.
Results: Overall there was no difference between groups on general empathy. The empathy induction group had more event related empathy, however, there was no effect of empathy on memory accuracy. For cued recall, participants were more accurate on questions relating to correct (89%) information compared to misleading (37%) information. For the recognition questions, participants were about as accurate for the correct (63%) and misleading (60%) information.
Conclusions: These findings indicate that feelings of empathy toward the victim of a crime may not improve the accuracy of witness memory. Cued recall results in superior memory performance for correct information, but very poor performance for misleading information. Recognition recall is moderately accurate for both correct and misleading information.
Keywords:
Empathy,
Memory,
Eyewitness Memory,
memory test,
misinformation effect
Conference:
12th Annual Psychology Research Conference, 2015, Coffs Harbour, Australia, 25 Sep - 26 Sep, 2015.
Presentation Type:
Research
Topic:
Psychology
Citation:
Andary
J and
Longstaff
M
(2015). The effect of empathy on eyewitness memory.
Front. Psychol.
Conference Abstract:
12th Annual Psychology Research Conference, 2015.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2015.66.00016
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
23 Sep 2015;
Published Online:
23 Sep 2015.
*
Correspondence:
Mr. Joseph Andary, Southern Cross University, Psychology, School of Health and Human Sciences, Coffs Harbour, NSW, 2450, Australia, j.andary.10@student.scu.edu.au