Assignment 2 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.”