Category: Draft

Memory accuracy is important for individuals to express their experience and is a significant part of legal implications. Both articles: “Negative Emotion Enhances Memory Accuracy: Behavioral and Neuroimaging Evidence” by Elizabeth A. Kensinger, and “Eyewitness Memory Contamination through Misleading Questions by Reporters” by Robin Blom and Kuo-Ting Huang, introduced the issue of post-event memory Inaccuracy and delve into the reasoning behind from two different perspectives. Kensinger focused on how internal emotion affects memory while Blom and Huang focused on external effects, such as if the leading questions asked affect memory reconstruction. Even though these two sources examine memory findings in two separate approaches, both describe an invention reaction in that cause-and-effect exists when an individual tries to recall a previous scene. The way both sources are structured is similar, they begin with their past belief about memory, then introduce the missing components of their belief which later get emphasized through formal experiments with ethos.

These authors engaged with the audiences effectively with an identical passage structure as they started their passage by addressing the phenomenon. Blom and Huang reinforce the fact that wrongful conviction cases are often on news media but not much improvement has been done to avoid future eyewitness misidentification. This concern is closely related to every individual, and readers are more likely to consider an analysis of more relevant experiments. Similarly, in Kensinger’s paper, she mentions how people tend to remember events that contain emotions more vividly than those that involve less emotion. This opening catches the reader’s interest as it introduces a concept that the public is familiar with and believes in. People are more likely to continue reading due to curiosity in finding out whether the results conform to their pre-existing understanding. Indeed, these authors close their research in an identical conclusion structure as well by explaining their experiments’ results in a more comprehensible way to the audience.

Both articles are pure studies with experiments posted on Sage Journal, where all articles are rigorously peer-reviewed. With that, the sources also have a DOI Digital Object Identifier which adds more credibility. Almost everything throughout the passage can be proven by other references listed, and there were more than 20 references for Kensinger’s paper while Blom and Huang’s paper has over 35 references. With these reliable components, the authority and authenticity of the authors and the experiments are high; this contributes to the establishment of the ethos of the authors and logos of the articles. On top of that, even with their detailed experiments, their conclusions open new discussions in the field of memory recall. Kensinger expressed that “over the past 30 years, research has demonstrated convincingly that emotional memories are not impervious to forgetting or distortion. However, whether emotion enhances the detail with which information is remembered or whether emotion simply biases a person to believe that they retained a vivid memory continues to be debated.” Her study has proven that scenes with negative emotions are more likely to be identified within memory, still, she wishes the field could delve even deeper into how much emotion enhances the details. Blom and Huang’s research conclusion expressed that leading questions being asked will eventually affect the way individuals recall the crime scene. Their attitudes are firmly supported by experiments conducted. Still, they are going deeper into this topic and believe “it may be even worth investigating whether certain interview questions and techniques have different effects when asked by police or journalists, as interviewees may experience different power structures that could lead to different power structures that could lead to different answers and willingness to answer in more or less detail to similar questions.” When an article is written logically and with inspirational questions, audiences potentially believe in it more because the authors seem to understand what they are sharing.

For an experiment to be conducted there must be a hypothesis in the first case such as an if-and-then situation. If the leading question asked was different then does it affect the outcome of individuals recalling memory? If we remember sad memories better, then does it mean that painful memories are more accurate? Indeed, the hypothesis is creating a cause-and-effect situation as well, it is asking if the independent variable affects the dependent variable eventually, and if it does, how. More than that, specifically for Blom and Huang’s passage they explained the reason behind conducting this research and experiments: the lack of scholarly work on eyewitness misidentification in journalism and mass communication. This is what causes our authors to react and perform their experiments that further affect public understanding. For Kensinger’s research, cause-and-effect are implicitly in the conclusion part when she states that “Because a primary function of emotion is to guide action and to plan for similar future occurrences (Lazarus cited in Kensinger), it is logical that attention would be focused on potentially threatening information and that memory mechanisms would ensure that details predictive of an event’s affective relevance would be encoded precisely.”

Every time I have a call with my grandma, she tells this story over and over again that I was able to fill in every detail after times and times of calls. Sometimes she asked me questions like: “Did you recognize that woman as me?” or anxious about what would happen if I did disappear over the corner. I am over eighteen now, but she reminds me repeatedly not to go with strangers as if she worries the kidnap will ever happen again. I barely remember the scene; it was after she told me the story that I began to have this memory with pictures in my mind.

We are on a family trip to Hong Kong Disneyland, holding my grandma’s hand in the squishy airport, walking with a huge group of people, not only my relatives but their friends as well. As always, I am holding my red suitcase when my mom asks me to greet people, with faces, I recognized or never seen before. I am only 4-5-6 years old, kindergarten age, so I greet them all using uncles and aunts. I mean… don’t hope a little kid understands the complex “relative title” that exists in the Chinese culture, not even mentioning how to properly address them. On the other side, they do not care about me either, they are all excited about the trip that is coming. 

I guess I am just going to stay with my grandma in the back of the group. 

It is an enormous airport, with massive passengers rushing through. The announcement is loudly reporting the closing of gates but there are people still not aboard yet. Everything seems so BIG to the LITTLE me. We have walked for a long time, at least I was a bit bored, so I reached into my pocket for some cookies that I brought before leaving home this morning. On my right hand it is my favorite red suitcase, and on the left, it is some strawberry cookies. One person rushed through beside me, then two, and three. Probably the ones that the announcement calls for. I’m laughing with cookies in my mouth and ask my grandma if they are going to make it there before the airplane takes off. 

She did not answer me. 

As I realized that the hand, I was holding was not my grandma’s, I looked at that woman’s face for a long time, trying to see if I could match it with anyone I had greeted before. I CANNOT. IT IS A COMPLETE STRANGER. Our hands hold. She holds my hand tightly. We walked fast, fast down the airport, fast enough that no one realized I was gone. Immediately, I cried out asking to use the bathroom saying that I was about to pee my pants. They did not allow me obviously, but the crying attracted other passengers and some of my relatives. They chat about why that kid is crying, and at the same time, my grandma starts to realize that I am missing. She and my mom tracked down the path and saw me crying with three strangers still holding tightly to my red suitcase. I wonder if it’s the fact that they recognized me or the red suitcase that they saw. Yes, that simply, I was kidnapped. Nothing as dramatic as a television show or movie might demonstrate happened, it was just a “mid-hold” of hands. They run straight to me, and I am still crying about going to the bathroom; I was completely overwhelmed and numbed when they reached me, seems like peeing my pants was really going to happen. 

My mom and my grandma just let the lady slip away with her group, they turned to the corner that they intended to bring me to and disappeared into the crowd. 

I have told this story over and over to my friends as a funny moment of my life, but I know how serious it would be if I was kidnapped that day. It will be more than fingers chopped off as Grandma used this saying to scare me. I know she worries, and she regrets, she thinks it was all her fault that she let go of my hand that day. She regrets that she should have run to me the first sight when she saw me with that stranger instead of double confirming with my mom. I am over eighteen now, but she reminds me repeatedly not to go with strangers as if she worries the kidnap will happen again.

Back in kindergarten, the school had implemented “how to avoid kidnap” in the curriculum, we even had a kidnap drill planned by instructors and parents during school hours. I never ever failed to keep myself safe in these drills, which seems funny to me now because the only time I failed was in a real scene: that airport day I did go with that woman. Even though practicing your kids how to act for the potential risks of being kidnapped is important, true kidnaps come in different forms that you could never be fully prepared for. Instead of relying on little kids, believe that they are going to use the skills they learned at home and school to escape from some adult kidnappers, just keep high attention on your kids as kidnapping can happen anywhere at any time. I am still alive with my two arms and legs, but still, it was out of luck that the kidnap failed. They could have made me faint or dragged me away when I was crying, telling passengers that I was just being naughty. If my grandma did not realize that I was missing, or the kidnappers walked fast enough and brought me past that corner. I would probably be gone now.