Assefi and Garry (2003) hoped to better understand alcohol consumption’s effects on memory. The main question they hope to answer is “whether told-alcohol subjects would be more affected by misleading post event information than told-tonic subjects” (Assefi & Garry, 2003, p.2). The investigators hypothesized that alcohol placebos affect behaviors in social influences but not nonsocial influences. This is an experimental study which uses a placebo and an eyewitness testimony design to reveal the social and nonsocial influences of memory.
This experiment consisted of 148 undergraduates. Each subject received a control and post event information (PEI). All subjects received an envelope telling them if they had tonic or vodka, yet all subjects received a plain tonic despite what the envelope led them to believe. After watching an action movie, the subjects viewed slides of a shoplifter. Two versions of the crime scene were shown, each with different item characteristics. Next, the subjects worked on filler tasks until it was time to read a misleading narrative containing false and true information about the items shown in the
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shoplifting scene. After working on filler tasks for another 3 minutes, the subjects took a quiz on what they recalled about the items. Finally, the group was asked to rate their confidence in their answers on a scale of 1, being not confident, to 5, being very confident. Assefi and Garry (2003) predicted that the told-alcohol subjects would be more likely to believe misleading PEI than the told-tonic subjects.
Thus, the ones that received the vodka envelope would be more likely to believe the false items were present in the original scene than the ones who received plain tonic. They also believed that subjects in both groups would have similar responses to the control items. Thus, no matter what they believed they would both remember the accurate items listed that were not tampered with. Because this is a quantitative study, the independent variable is whether the subject had the tonic or vodka envelope. The dependent variable is the subject’s memory performance shown by the test. These two variables are linked because whether they have one envelope or the other will show which group seems to perform
better. The results of the study showed that subjects who were under the impression they had drunken vodka were significantly more deceived on the memory test than subjects who were told they had not consumed vodka. Also, the vodka subjects were proven to be more confident about their answers. These results led Assifi and Garry to conclude that the belief that one has consumed an alcoholic beverage can affect not just memory, but confidence in that memory as well. This result also ended with them answers that memory can be affected by social influences. This being because the alcohol placebo obviously did not affect their memory, but the social influence on the subject that they had consumed the alcohol did. These findings disprove the previous assumption that poor memory performance depends on negatively affected encoding processes (Assifi & Garry, 2003). This is due to the findings that no difference was shown between the two groups on the control items in the memory test. The results also show how memory is not a social function.
Today, one out of every thirteen adults abuse alcohol or are alcoholics. That means nearly thirteen million Americans have a drinking problem. (www.niaaa.nih.gov) This topic offers a broad range of ideas to be researched within the psychological field. For this particular project, the topic of alcoholism and the psychological effects on people best fit the criteria. Alcoholism is defined as a disorder characterized by the excessive consumption of and dependence on alcoholic beverages, leading to physical and psychological harm and impaired social and vocational functioning. (www.dictionary.com) Through this project, the most important information regarding personal experiences dealing with alcoholism will be revealed. Not only are statistics, like the facts mentioned before, important when dealing with an issue such as alcoholism, but personal accounts and information are often more powerful and influential evidence. Non-alcoholics should be allowed to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for research purposes.
One of the last types of ways investigators are coached to detect deception is in the behavioral attitudes of a person being interviewed such as being unconcerned or over anxious (Kassin, 2005). The success rate of looking for these cues are very successful in telling if an individual is being deceitful and has surpassed any laboratory tests conducted on the subject. The laboratory test however did reveal some interesting facts. The research showed that people who had training and experience did not score better than the control group who received no training. In fact all individuals scored at the chance level with the people who had training scored just above chance or at the chance level. To check if special training in the detection of deception was more accurate a study ...
Flax observed that he woke up in his child’s bed, wine spilled all over himself, his computer and his child’s blanket. He admits that he was getting home later from work and having to squeeze his drinking into less time than before, (Flax, 2016, p. 5). As drinking inhibits judgement, a person would engage in behavior like drinking in his child’s bed, that would not normally occur. Alcohol impairs judgement, exaggerates
False information provided by people, perhaps because believed it is what the interviewer wants to hear, The Hawthorne effect, invalidates it (Taylor, 1995).
Zeigler, Donald. "The neurocognitive effects of alcohol on adolescents and college students." Preventive Medicine 40. (2004): 23 – 32. Web. 10 Apr. 2014. .
Our sample consisted of 43 undergraduate psychology students in a Learning and Cognition lab (Psy A355L) at the University of Alaska Anchorage. The participants were adults, but data was not collected on age, sex, or any other demographic. All the students provided their consent and time, in exchange for 15 points in the class. The ethical principles of the American Psychological Association were followed in this human experiment (American Psychological Association, 2010).
Rationale and Variables: The Experiment that was conducted in class determined the affects of 'ecstasy' or MDMA on the participants' memory. In addition to testing for their ability to recall information it also looked at the number of false memory that were related to the actual word "slow" in the class study. In the experiment Dr. Earleywine used a list of words that were to be memorized, and recall in a given time. This study is related to another experiment conducted by A.C Parrott and J. Lasky. In their study they looked at the effects of "ecstasy" or MDMA on mood and cognition. They tested three groups: non- MDMA, novice-MDMA users, and regular MDMA users. They used different methods to test the three groups, included in the methods was word recall, which was also used in the class study by Dr. Earleywine. The result from that experiment showed that "ecstasy" or MDMA users did have memory problems. Another study was also conducted by A.C. Parrott, A. Leess, N.J Garnham M. Jones, and K. Wesnes, which was relate also to the other experiments. This experiment was conducted using three groups: non-MDMA, novice-MDMA and regular MDMA users. They used series of methods to conduct their study, and found their results similar to the earlier study. Analyzing the finding of the two studies, Dr. Earleywine decided to do a study with the mind set of making a connection between the rates of intrusions that participants who have used MDMA, compared with the rate of intrusions with participants, who did not use MDMA. The independent variables were the two groups MDMA users and non-MDMA users, and the dependent variables are the intrusions, and words recalled.
Watson, J. M., Bunting, M. F., Poole, B. J., & Conway, A. R. (2005). Individual differences in susceptibility to false memory in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 31(1), 76-85.
Similar studies were done to a different set of college students and they tended to have the same results. After giving as much detail about each memory, the students were interviewed about what they may have written done about what they had remembered. During the last part of the experiment, each of the students were debriefed and asked to guess which memory they believed was false.
The ingestion of alcoholic beverages for their enjoyable effects is a custom which has been around for thousands of years, and alcohol continues to be a popular drug because of its short-term effects (Coleman, Butcher & Carson, 1984). An enormous amount of damage can be attributed directly to alcohol abuse as a result of lost jobs, accidents caused by drunk drivers, and so forth (Maltzman, 2000). Alcohol also compounds other problems--an estimated 25% to 40% of hospital patients have problems caused by, or recovery delayed by alcohol abuse (Maltzman, 2000). Clinical psychologists spend about one-fourth of their time dealing with people who are suffering in part from alcohol or other substance problems (Vaillant, 1995). Although alcohol problems have been around for so long, it is only recently that these problems have begun to be associated with medical or psychological difficulties.
Memory is one of the most critical parts of cognition. It is important because it is involved in almost every aspect of cognition including problem solving, decision making, attention, and perception. Because of this importance, people rely on one’s memory to make important decisions. The value of one’s memory in this society is so high that it is used as evidence to either save one’s life or kill one’s life during murder trials. But as many of the cognitive psychologists know, human’s memory can cause many errors. One of these errors is false memory which is either remembering events that never happened or remembering events differently from the actual event. This finding of false memory raised big interests among psychologists and general public and many researches were done in order to find more about the false memory. The constructive approach to memory, which states that memory is constructed by person based on what really happened in addition to person’s other knowledge, experiences, and expectations, supports the idea of false memory. Just like what constructive approach to memory states, the false memory can be created by person’s knowledge, common biases, and suggestions. The present study was done in order to demonstrate one methodology that biases people to create and recall false memories. The present study is based on Deese’s experiment in 1959 and also on Roediger and McDermott’s experiment in 1995. The participants will be presented with sequence of words visually, and then they would have to classify a set of words as either in the sequence or not in the sequence. Our hypothesis is that people will create false memories and recall distractor words that are related to the sequence of words presented significantly m...
Alcohol is something that people use to help with multiply different things and some studies have shown that alcohol may help protect our bodies from cardiovascular disease. Alcohol does have side effects to our health the surroundings around us and can cause violence, vehicle crashes and even suicide. Alcohol does have an effect on people that many social drinkers may not realize. Many people usually have tried alcohol around 13 years of age and high school students consume more wine coolers that are sold in the U.S. and they drink more than 1 billion beers a year. To understand the effects of alcohol, it begins with the brain. It is a curiosity as to why people feel the need to drink and drive. The way the brain works while influenced with alcohol has always fascinated me. Drinking and driving is one of the biggest decisions that alcohol leads to. The National Public Services Research Institute (NHTSA) did a study on 600 people who admitted driving while under the influence of alcohol. They described in detail the decisions they made leading up to the occurrence of driving while impaired like whether to take part in a drinking event, how to get to the event, how much to drink, and how to get home. The people being interviewed revealed more than 2,000 individual decisions that led to alcohol impaired driving. The decisions were then broken down into several categories as shown on the graph attached. Little is known as to what leads people to continue to drinking and driving. But as research shows, people do think, prior to drinking, how they will get home. It’s after they have already had been drinking that they decide to get behind the wheel.
Specific Purpose: After listening to my speech, my audience will know how alcohol was made and how it affects humans negatively and positively.
People fail to notice when they are presented with something different from what they originally chose and tend to come up with explanations as to why they picked that specific choice. In this research paper, Cochran, Greenspan, Bogart, and Loftus discuss how choice blindness can lead to distorted eyewitness memories. In their experiment, the studied if the participants in their research realized modifications to their memory reports and if these changes could possibly effect the participants’ memory. Cochran, Greenspan, Bogart, and Loftus conducted two different experiments. Experiment 1 was constructed on two self-sourced vs. other-sourced between participants and two misinformation vs. control within participants. They had participants watch a slideshow that showed a woman intermingling with three other characters and one of them steals her wallet. Then they completed a personality measure in 15 minute retention interval which was followed by questions about their memories from the slideshow. After, they were given another 15 minute retention interval and then shown their responses to the memory question, but three of their responses were revised. According to Cochran, Greenspan, Bogart, and Loftus (2016), “experiment 1 demonstrated that when witnesses were exposed to altered versions of their own memory reports for episodic details of an event, their memories changed to be consistent with
Are teens capable of making life altering decisions on their own? This is a question that not only concerns parents, but the general public as well. Based on scientific studies teens are known for having rebellious actions and behaviors. Most people think that they base their actions on their emotions and hormones, but they really have little control over these temptations because of how their brain is developing. This is one of the reasons teenagers have a bad reputation in today’s society. As a community people should not judge a book by it's cover, but instead take a look at what’s really going on inside the brain.