Deborah Davis

University of Nevada, Reno | UNR · Department of Psychology

The present article addresses claims commonly made by prosecution witnesses in sexual assault trials: that attention narrows under stress, and that these attended aspects of the event are encoded in a way that ensures accuracy and resistance to fading and distortion. We provide evidence to contradict such claims. Given that what is encoded is large...

This chapter reviews the causes of cognitive bias in forensic examinations and methods to enable mitigation. Causes relating to the nature of human cognition, the forensic task itself, emotion and motivation, contextual information (such as other case evidence), and individual differences, among others are considered. Where and how cognitive biases...

In this paper, we explore the role of emotion in the interpretation and memory of sexual encounters. We consider situations likely to generate negative emotions during sex, and the mechanisms through which the experience of negative emotions can lead to false memories of coercion and mislabeling of an encounter as sexual assault. Specifically, we c...

Scientific research on police interrogations and confessions has mushroomed since the 1990s. This wealth of theoretical and empirical work is restricted almost exclusively to circumstances where suspects are interrogated by persons they know to be police officers. However, suspects are often interrogated by, and offer incriminating statements or co...

On 26 September 1983, 11-year-old Sabrina Buie's body was found in a soybean field in Red Springs, North Carolina, where she had been raped and murdered. Based solely on 17-year-old high school student Ethel Furmage's report of a rumour, the Red Springs Police suspected 19-year-old Henry McCollum of the murder and interrogated him overnight on 28-2...

Legal scholars and psychological researchers have identified the visceral state of sexual arousal as a potential contributing factor to the perpetration of sexual violence. Visceral states such as sexual arousal might systematically influence social perception and perhaps lead to misinterpretations of behavior, such as overestimates of others' will...

Child sex abuse (CSA) is a specific category of crime for which the presumption of guilt may be particularly high, especially for defendant categories stereotypically associated with the crime. The current study utilized survey methodology to examine the magnitude of the presumption of guilt for CSA, as well as stereotypes associating perpetrator r...

Misperception of others’ sexual willingness or consent is widely considered to contribute to sexual coercion. Sexual arousal is commonly present among those in situations with potential to result in sexual assault. The current research tests the effects of sexual arousal on related attitudes: including those toward token resistance, assertive sexua...

This chapter reviews the attempts of police to elicit confessions to child and adult sexual assault through standard police interrogation and through the use of alleged victims or associates of alleged victims as surrogate interrogators. Specifically, we describe the use of “pretext calls” (otherwise known as “cold” “controlled” “one party consent”...

This chapter reviews the attempts of police to elicit confessions to child and adult sexual assault through standard police interrogation and through use of alleged victims or associates of alleged victim as surrogate interrogators. Specifically, we describe the use of “pretext calls” (otherwise known as “cold,” “controlled,” “one party consent,” o...

How potential sexual partners and third-party observers perceive women’s sexual intentions can affect the propensity to commit or excuse sexual aggression. We examined the effect of feelings of power on interpretations of women’s behaviors. We expected manipulated feelings of power to systematically influence perceivers’ interpretations of sexual i...

Disputes over acquaintance rape typically center on the issue of whether the alleged victim consented to sex. Disputed sexual encounters often take place when one or both involved parties is sexually aroused, and this arousal might influence the extent to which the parties perceive sexual consent. Two studies tested the effects of men’s sexual arou...

This chapter provides a brief review of the history and elements of the controversy surrounding the reality of repression and recovery of memories of sexual abuse and other traumatic events. The main body of the chapter concerns the mechanisms through which false memories of such events can be formed. These include the importance of culturally prev...

Rape is unique among criminal cases. Unlike other case types, alleged victims in rape cases are essentially “on trial” as much as their alleged perpetrators: In their determination of whether rape occurred, jurors often consider information about the victim’s behavior prior to the alleged rape, including her sexual history, her attire, her consumpt...

Chapter reviews legal definitions of sexual consent and research literature on sexual consent communication (and miscommunication)

Wrongful convictions often flow from a cascade of investigative errors and sometimes deliberate investigative and/or prosecutorial misconduct. This chapter considers several steps in the cascade of errors and misconduct that can lead to wrongful conviction. It begins with the difficulty of the process of investigation and the inevitable infusion of...

This chapter considers six sources of vulnerability to interrogation-induced confession among racial minorities: (1) stereotypes associating racial minorities with crime, (2) stereotype threat, (3) language barriers, (4) enhanced power differentials between minorities and law enforcement, (5) perceptions of legal rights, law enforcement and the jus...

The purpose of expert testimony is to provide an overview of the research literature in a way that helps jurors evaluate the credibility of a particular defendant’s disputed confession. We begin by discussing the admissibility of expert testimony and how judges decide whether to allow expert testimony at trial. We then review the substantial resear...

Interviewers often face respondents reluctant to disclose sensitive, embarrassing or potentially damaging information. We explored effects of priming 5 states of mind on willingness to disclose: including 2 expected to facilitate disclosure (self-affirmation, attachment security), and 3 expected to inhibit disclosure (self-disaffirmation, attachmen...

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) was developed in the late 1980s as a treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder. Since then the therapy has been shown to be efficacious for this and other disorders. It is broadly disseminated and widely practiced. There are several controversies surrounding this therapy. Though eye movements w...

This paper reviews sources of distortion in memory for sexual encounters, particularly those between intoxicated participants. We review factors leading to initial misinterpretations of sexual consent including the indirect nature of sexual consent communications, misleading cultural sexual scripts, misinterpretation of passivity, and others. In th...

Among the most controversial topics in modern psychology has been that of whether memories of traumatic life events can be repressed, pushed out of conscious awareness and inaccessible to the victim for long periods of time but nevertheless be “recovered” and remembered accurately years or decades later. Critics have argued against the phenomenon o...

Memory is essential to human survival. It contains the entirety of people's knowledge and understanding of themselves and their world. It helps individuals identify the objects around them, predict and understand events they may confront, and strategically interact with their physical and social worlds to survive and achieve their goals. It tells i...

Among the most interesting ways individuals can deceive themselves is through memory. Though there are countless undisputed ways in which memory fails or becomes distorted, the concept of "repression" has been among the most controversial in modern psychology. On one hand, proponents believe that repression is a mental mechanism that helps individu...

Presents data on error rates in eyewitness identification performance and examines new sources of contamination in eyewitness memory resulting from increased use of social media among witnesses

This chapter considers the issue of whether the legal system assumes greater accuracy in the production and assessment of eyewitness identifications than the limits of cognition reasonably permit. It first reviews what is known about the limits of accuracy in eyewitness performance under optimal conditions, and the ease with which this maximum perf...

This chapter examines the failure of police, attorneys, judges, and juries to appreciate the magnitude of acute impairments of will and cognition in interrogation. The authors explore sources of enhanced susceptibility to interrogative influence triggered by the nature of the suspect’s immediate circumstances, rather than by chronic personal charac...

Discusses reasons that false criminal confessions are so difficult to identify and discriminate from true confessions

As reflected in rulings ranging from Trial Courts to the U.S. Supreme Court, our judiciary commonly views as “voluntary,” and admits into evidence, interrogation-induced confessions obtained under conditions entailing stressors sufficient to severely compromise or eliminate the rational decision making capacities and self-regulation abilities neces...

In response to increasing evidence that police interrogation procedures can and do elicit false confessions from innocent suspects, American Courts have offered guidelines intended to protect suspects from coercive interrogations and to ensure the voluntariness and reliability of any confessions obtained. However, faced with legal prohibitions agai...

This study examined attachment styles in patients with lung cancer and their spouses and associations between attachment styles and patient and spouse adjustment. One hundred twenty-seven patients with early stage lung cancer completed measures of attachment style, marital quality, self-efficacy, pain, depression, anxiety, and quality of life. Thei...

Focusing on failures to detect false confessions, this article addresses the issue of police contamination, which has been explored in previous work by the authors as well as in Brandon Garrett’s recent book, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong. The authors review some of Garrett’s most important findings, considering them...

Interrogation-induced false confessions are a systemic feature of American criminal justice. In the last few decades, scholars have assembled evidence of instances of false confessions that resulted in wrongful convictions. Despite procedural safeguards and a constitutional prohibition against legally coercive interrogation techniques, American law...

This essay furnishes an overview of scholars’ exploration of the phenomenon of false confession in the American criminal justice system, which remains one of the most prominent causes of wrongful convictions. The essay examines several important issues studied by social scientists and legal scholars, including why false confessions occur, what happ...

The current study investigated the effects of change blindness and crime severity on eyewitness identification accuracy. This research, involving 717 subjects, examined change blindness during a simulated criminal act and its effects on subjects’ accuracy for identifying the perpetrator in a photospread. Subjects who viewed videos designed to induc...

Many cases could not be successfully prosecuted without a confession, and, in the absence of a confession, many would be much more costly to investigate and to develop other evidence sufficient to convict. Responding to this pressure to reliably elicit confessions from their suspects, the police have developed sophisticated psychological techniques...

The vast majority of false confessions occur in the context of interrogation, and in response to the sources of distress and persuasive tactics of the interrogation. However, there are widely held mistaken assumptions that a false confessor must suffer some personal defect such as a mental disorder. In this article, we explain that many normal peop...

The effectiveness of an interrogation tactic dubbed the "sympathetic detective with a time limited offer" was tested. Participants read two versions of an interrogation transcript, with and without the tactic. Those who read the sympathetic detective version believed the detective had greater authority to determine whether and with what to charge t...

A steadily increasing tide of literature has documented the existence and causes of false confession as well as the link between false confession and wrongful conviction of the innocent. This literature has primarily addressed three issues: the manner in which false confessions are generated by police interrogation, individual differences in suscep...

Psychologically speaking, a successful interrogation is analogous to selling a resident of the Yukon air conditioning in January; for a suspect to acknowledge a criminal act involving negative consequences requires that the suspect believe a confession is in his best interest. Jayne, B. C., & Buckley, J. P. (1999). The investigator anthology (p. 20...

Three experiments investigated the role of ‘change blindness’ in mistaken eyewitness identifications of innocent bystanders to a simulated crime. Two innocent people appeared briefly in a filmed scene in a supermarket. The ‘continuous innocent’ (CI) walked down the liquor aisle and passed behind a stack of boxes, whereupon the perpetrator emerged a...

Causes and Prevention of False ConfessionsMinimizing Consequences of False ConfessionsConclusions References

Long standing interest in individual differences linked to the experience of, and adjustment to, pain has recently expanded to include the “attachment styles” (Bowlby, 1982) of both pain patients and their caregivers. Following a brief review of the nature and origin of attachment styles, we review recent research addressing issues regarding attach...

On July 17, 1996, Trans-World Airlines flight 800 crashed into the ocean. Reports consistent with the theory that a missile attack may have caused the crash soon spread among witnesses, investigators, and the media. Despite physical evidence pointing to another cause, discussion of the missile theory of the crash persisted for years. How did so man...

An Internet survey was conducted to extend the investigation of attachment style to the domains of sexual communication and sexual satisfaction. We hypothesized that insecure attachment would be associated with sexual dissatisfaction, mediated by inhibited communication of sexual needs. Further, the association of attachment with inhibited communic...

Langer's (1974, 1975) theory regarding the conditions under which subjects performing a chance task will suffer from an illusion of control over the outcome has specified 6 conditions proposed to enhance the illusion ofcontrol in chance tasks. A number of studies have applied her theory and predictions to gambling, a real-world arena of chance task...

The issues surrounding repressed, recovered, or false memories have sparked one of the greatest controversies in the mental health profession in the twentieth century. We review evidence concerning the existence of the repression and recovery of autobiographical memories of traumatic events and research on the development of false autobiographical...

This chapter explores the “road to perdition”—the nature and typical sequence of interrogative strategies and events leading to false confession as well as the underlying psychological principles through which they exert their influence. In recognition of the various contributory causes of false confession, the chapter considers several classificat...

The importance of trial outcomes, in combination with high uncertainty about how to diagnose individual juror biases and verdict leanings, has led attorneys to seek aid from sources ranging from professional lore, psychics, private investigators, and graphologists to modern scientific jury selection services. This chapter explicates the manner in w...

The relation of attachment style to subjective motivations for sex was investigated in an Internet survey of 1999 respondents. The relations of attachment anxiety and avoidance to overall sexual motivation and to the specific motives for emotional closeness, reassurance, self-esteem enhancement, stress reduction, partner manipulation, protection fr...

Chapter reviews police interrogation tactics and the social influence principles underlying them, and considers their role in the production of false confession.

This paper responds to criticisms/misconstruals of our measure of the maximum probative value of evidence (D. Davis & W. C. Follette, 2002), and our conclusions regarding the potentially prejudicial role of "intuitive profiling" evidence, including motive. We argue that R. D. Friedman and R. C. Park's (2003) criticisms and example cases are largely...

Associations between gender, age, emotional involvement, and attachment style and reactions to romantic relationship dissolution were studied in a survey of more than 5,000 Internet respondents. It was hypothesized that individual reactions to breakups would be congruent with characteristic attachment behaviors and affect-regulation strategies gene...

This chapter examines the argument that the psychology of voluntary intoxication and sexual consent does not support the law that intoxicated alleged victims should be presumed unable to consent. The chapter presents evidence in support of the propositions that (1) consent may occur well before the actual act; (2) the decision to use alcohol is rel...

Use of cosmetic surgeries has increased steadily over the last decade, and continues to rise in young and old alike. The purpose of present research was to investigate the relationship of personality to use of cosmetic procedures of various kinds. It was expected that adult attachment style, in particular attachment anxiety, would be positively rel...

It is argued that American courts may be routinely admitting evidence with little to no probative value and great potential for prejudicial impact. This may be particularly likely with regard to what is essentially "intuitive profiling" or "stereotype" related evidence, defined herein as evidence suggesting that the defendant (or other party), or h...

Analyses of the rules governing conversation have frequently pointed to the existence of a rule dictating that responses to others' communications should be relevant. Unfortunately, there have been few systematic theoretical analyses of the consequences of violations of the response relevance rule. The present research was designed to extend our pr...

During the past ten years, psychologists have begun to devote considerable attention to the sequential properties of social interaction. The majority of this research has focused on description of sequential contingencies between the behaviors of interaction partners, inferences concerning the conversational control functions of the observed behavi...

The rewards of interaction interpretation of the similarity-attraction relationship implies that this relationship should be stronger when similarity has stronger implications for the quality of interaction. In contrast, the reinforcement-affect (D. Byrne & G. L. Clore, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1967, 6(Whole No. 638)) interpreta...

Analyzes the role of unequal weighting (UW) in the averaging model of information integration. A distinction is made between UW at the normative level (which has been referred to as "differential weighting") and UW at the level of the individual S (which is here called "idiosyncratic weighting"—IW). The prevalence of IW in the trait-judgment impres...

Previous research relating status to intimate behavior has demonstrated that persons are more reluctant to initiate physical intimacy with another of higher than one of equal or lower status. The present research explored three potential interpretations of the observed relationship: (1) that persons perceive others of higher status as less likely t...