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. Even though these two sources examine memory findings in two separate approaches, their research is structured similarly with trustworthy content that includes cause-and-effect invention.
These authors engaged with the audiences effectively with an identical passage structure as they started their passage by addressing the phenomenon. They begin with their past belief about memory, then introduce the missing components of their belief which later get emphasized through formal experiments. 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 by explaining their experiments’ results in a more comprehensible way to the audience. Both passages had a straightforward start and conclusion that appealed to the readers. Even if the experiments contain technical vocabularies that are hard to understand, readers could still acknowledge the research either way.
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 papers. On top of that, one research result often leads to other research needed, so even with their detailed experiments, the conclusions still open new discussions in the field of memory recall. This action demonstrated the attentiveness of these authors and won a higher reliance from the readers. Kensinger expressed that scenes with negative emotions are more likely to be identified or least likely to be distorted, “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. (Kensinger)” Still, she challenges the field to delve even deeper into how much emotion enhances the details. Moreover, Blom and Huang’s research believes “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 answers and willingness to answer in more or less detail to similar questions. (Blom and Huang)” As a result, when an article is written logically and with inspirational questions, audiences are more likely to believe in it because the authors are presented with credibility. In this case, all Kensinger, Blom, and Huang, are presented with ethos.
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. It is asking if the independent variable affects the dependent variable eventually, and if it does, how. More than that, for Blom and Huang’s passage the reason behind conducting their experiments was 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, the cause-and-effect is implicitly included 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 Kensinger).” This explains the logic behind humans remembering negative emotional scenes better; we need that information to predict and prevent relevant occurrences. Even though cause and effect are presented in different content in these two research, both explain how one action might lead to another. Pre-existing issues often cause individuals to conduct research, and the results are usually relevant to another social norm. This explains why cause-and-effect invention commonly exists in research papers, it is because the experiments results that were conducted often lead to other studies.