Fatal impact? The effects of emotional arousal and weapon presence on police officers' memories for a simulated crime

Abstract

Purpose. (1) To investigate the effects of emotional arousal and weapon presence on the completeness and accuracy of police officers' memories; and (2) to better simulate the experience of witnessing a shooting and providing testimony. Methods. A firearms training simulator was used to present 70 experienced police officers with either a shooting or a domestic dispute scenario containing no weapons. Arousal was measured using both self‐report and physiological indices. Recall for event details was tested after a 10‐minute delay using a structured interview. Identification accuracy was assessed with a photographic line‐up. Results. Self‐report measures confirmed that the shooting induced greater arousal than did the other scenario. Overall, officers' memories for the event were less complete, but more accurate, when they had witnessed the shooting. The recall and line‐up data did not support a weapon focus effect. Conclusions. Police officers' recall performance can be affected both qualitatively and quantitatively by witnessing an arousing event such as a shooting.

Sex trade workers' narratives of sexual violence: A field investigation

“…Between-participants comparisons for detailed and for less-detailed narratives of sexual assaults reveal no differences in the overall amount of details between weapon-present and weapon-absent narratives. This finding is in line with other field studies that have not supported the weapon focus effect (e.g., Hulse & Memon, 2006;Kuehn, 1974;Tollestrup et al, 1994;Wagstaff et al, 2003). Of course, such findings do not prove that the weapon focus effect does not exist.…”

“…Similarly, Cooper, Kennedy, Hervé, and Yuille (2002), like Wagstaff et al (2003), did not find any differences in recall between events that did vs did not involve a weapon. Moreover, Hulse and Memon's (2006) study of simulated crimes revealed no differences in identification accuracy between shootings vs other crimes not involving any weapons. In fact, Tollestrup et al (1994) demonstrated that eyewitnesses of crimes that involved a weapon reported significantly more details than those who witnessed crimes that did not involve weapons.…”

Eyewitness identification under stress in the London Dungeon

“…Police trainees who took part in a stressful simulated stop and search had better eyewitness recall than did trainees who took part in a low-stress simulation (Yuille, Davies, Gibling, Marxsen, & Porter, 1994). Hulse and Memon (2006) examined recall of police firearms officers who took part in a virtual reality simulation. There were few differences in recall between officers who took part in a 'shoot' scenario in which they fired their weapon compared to officers in a 'no shoot' scenario who did not open fire.…”

Armed and attentive: Holding a weapon can bias attentional priorities in scene viewing

“…Our findings showed a means by which other aspects of the situation could influence attention allocation and, thus, could also affect memory for events. In particular, Hulse and Memon (2006) used armed police officerswhose weapons could be readily used-and found more accurate, rather than less accurate, recall of a simulated crime, although recall of the event was less complete. Their results may be due not only to the particular population of police officers used in the study, but also to the changed attentional allocation of a police officer with a weapon ready to use.…”