The influence of direct and indirect speech on source memory

People perceive the same situation described in direct speech (e.g., John said, “I like the food at this restaurant”) as more vivid and perceptually engaging than described in indirect speech (e.g., John said that he likes the food at the restaurant). So, if direct speech enhances the perception of vividness relative to indirect speech, what are the effects of using indirect speech? In four experiments, we examined whether the use of direct and indirect speech influences the comprehender’s memory for the identity of the speaker. Participants read a direct or an indirect speech version of a story and then addressed statements to one of the four protagonists of the story in a memory task. We found better source memory at the level of protagonist gender after indirect than direct speech (Exp. 1–3). When the story was rewritten to make the protagonists more distinctive, we also found an effect of speech type on source memory at the level of the individual, with better memory after indirect than direct speech (Exp. 3–4). Memory for the content of the story, however, was not influenced by speech type (Exp. 4). While previous research showed that direct speech may enhance memory for how something was said, we conclude that indirect speech enhances memory for who said what

The Feature Positive Effect in Legal Decision Making: processing and evaluating present absent forensic evidence

On the 29th of May 2001 Kees B. was found guilty for the rape and murder of Nienke Kleiss, a ten year old Dutch girl. There was virtually no forensic evidence that he had committed this crime, but he had confessed, and so the police was convinced of his guilt. The fact that he retracted his confession soon after his crucial interrogation was not heavily weighted by the police. After four years of imprisonment, Kees B. was released, because Wik H. admitted he was the one who killed Nienke (van Koppen, 2003). Indeed, DNA of Wik H. was found at the crime scene. How come Kees B. was found guilty while, besides a striking lack of evidence, DNA found at the crime scene did not match his DNA? And why does one conclude so easily that someone is guilty once his DNA is found at the crime scene? Put shortly, how come one ignores evidence of absence so easily, whereas one gives so much weight to physically present evidence? The phenomenon described above (i.e., ignoring absent information while putting a lot of weight on present information) has been named the ‘feature positive-effect’ (FPE; Jenkins & Sainsbury, 1969), and it is the topic of this dissertation. The FPE originates from literature on Pavlovian conditioning. It was found that pigeons learn associations more quickly when the presence of a stimulus predicts (e.g., blue light is on) the presence of another stimulus (e.g., food can be obtained) rather than when the absence of a stimulus (e.g., blue light is off) predicts the presence of another stimulus. This difficulty with absent information relative to present information has also been described in other domains (e.g., omission bias). The fact that people seem to treat present and absent information differently is not necessarily a bad thing. However, as the example above illustrates, underweighting absent forensic evidence can have severe consequences. Sometimes, the underweighting of absent evidence is irrational and thus constitutes a bias. Unlike other biases that can influence the process of legal decision making, such as the confirmation bias (Nickerson, 1998), the FPE is relatively unknown and unstudied. However, given its possible severe consequences, studying this effect is important

The influence of police reporting styles on the processing of crime related information

Police records drawn up during or after a suspect's police interrogation play a crucial role in judicial systems and should therefore be factual representations of what occurred in the spoken interrogation. Within the judicial domain, however, little is known about how style of reporting (i.e., the specific language used) affects the interpretation of these facts. Furthermore, the relationship between police record ‘quality’ and variations in judgment of guilt, credibility or reliability has not been studied to date. In three studies, we investigated the influence of three commonly used recording styles (i.e., monolog, recontextualized and question-answer style) on judgments of guilt, credibility, and reliability in fictitious criminal cases. We hypothesized that participants would (1) find records in the question-answer style more credible and reliable than those in the monolog or recontextualized style, and (2) consider the recontextualized style to be the least credible and reliable. Experiment 1 showed that the Q&A style was perceived as more reliable than the other two styles. Experiment 2, a replication in which we also tested new hypotheses based on explorative analyses of Experiment 1, showed no effects of reporting style. To investigate whether the discrepancy in results was due to different scenarios, a third experiment that made use of multiple scenarios was conducted. We found effects of reporting style on perceived accuracy, imageability, and understandability. In sum, this study showed that factors as subtle as reporting style might impact the processing of information in contexts where only factual information should be taken into account

Embodied cognition, abstract concepts, and the benefits of new technology for implicit body manipulation

Current approaches on cognition hold that concrete concepts are grounded in concrete experiences. There is no consensus, however, as to whether this is equally true for abstract concepts. In this review we discuss how the body might be involved in understanding abstract concepts through metaphor activation. Substantial research has been conducted on the activation of common orientational metaphors with bodily manipulations, such as "power is up" and "more is up" representations. We will focus on the political metaphor that has a more complex association between the concept and the concrete domain. However, the outcomes of studies on this political metaphor have not always been consistent, possibly because the experimental manipulation was not implicit enough. The inclusion of new technological devices in this area of research, such as the Wii Balance Board, seems promising in order to assess the groundedness of abstract conceptual spatial metaphors in an implicit manner. This may aid further research to effectively demonstrate the interrelatedness between the body and more abstract representations

How body balance influences political party evaluations: A wii balance board study

Embodied cognition research has shown how actions or body positions may affect cognitive processes, such as autobiographical memory retrieval or judgments. The present study examined the role of body balance (to the left or the right) in participants on their attributions to political parties. Participants thought they stood upright on aWii™ Balance Board, while they were actually slightly tilted to the left or the right. Participants then ascribed fairly general political statements to one of 10 political parties that are represented in the Dutch House of Representatives. Results showed a significant interaction of congruent leaning direction with left-or right-wing party attribution. When the same analyses were performed with the political parties being divided into affiliations to the right, center, and left based on participants' personal opinions rather than a ruling classification, no effects were found. The study provides evidence that conceptual metaphors are activated by manipulating body balance implicitly. Moreover, people's judgments may be colored by seemingly trivial circumstances such as standing slightly out of balance

Understanding how grammatical aspect influences legal judgment

Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g., first-degree murder), the present study explored whether grammatical aspect may also impact legal judgments. In a series of four experiments participants were provided with a legal definition and a description of a crime in which the grammatical aspect of provocation and murder events were manipulated. Participants were asked to make a decision (first- vs. second-degree murder) and then indicate factors that impacted their decision. Findings suggest that legal judgments can be affected by grammatical aspect but the most robust effects were limited to temporal dynamics (i.e., imperfective aspect results in more murder actions than perfective aspect), which may in turn influence other representational systems (i.e., number of murder actions positively predicts perceived intentionality). In addition, findings demonstrate that the influence of grammatical aspect on situation model construction and evaluation is dependent upon the larger linguistic and semantic context. Together, the results suggest grammatical aspect has indirect influences on legal judgments to the extent that variability in aspect changes the features of the situation model that align with criteria for making legal judgments

Die Auswirkungen der Russifizierung auf die deutschbaltische Gesellschaft am Beispiel von Johannes Haller und seiner Mitgliedschaft in der Korporation Estonia

Die vorliegende Bakkalaureusarbeit beschäftigt sich verallgemeinernd mit der Russifizierung in den privilegierten deutschen Ostseeprovinzen 1883–1900. Dabei konzentriert man sich auf den Einfluss dieser neuen Politikrichtung des russischen Imperiums in der Universitätsstadt Dorpat in derselben Zeitspanne. Dorpat war als eine baltische Stadt bis dann quasi als eine andere Welt war mit ihren eigenen Rechten. Die dörptschen deutschbaltischen Verbindungen vertraten zugleich im Laufe des 19. Jahrhunderts die Sitten und Würden der dominanten Oberschicht, weshalb man sich auf sie und ihre Reaktion auf die Russifizierung besonders intensiv konzentriert. Dabei entsteht die Verknüpfung zu diesem Modernisierungsverfahren und dem berühmten deutschbaltischen Historiker Johannes Haller (1865–1947) und seinen Erfahrungen. Mit seiner akademischen Arbeit hat er das Geschichtsbewusstsein über die Deutschbalten in Deutschland verbessert. Dabei war er in Jahren 1883–1888 Student in Dorpat und Mitglied der deutschbaltischen Korporation Estonia. Welchen Einfluss hatte in diesem Fall die Russifizierung auf Hallers Leben und seine Verbindung Estonia, die man als typische Vertreter des deutschbaltischen Wesens gegen Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bezeichnen kann?http://www.ester.ee/record=b4688441*es

The Perceived Convincingness Model: why and under what conditions processing fluency and emotions are valid indicators of a message’s perceived convincingness

Persuasive messages aim to influence people’s behavior. Arguments in these messages typically refer to the positive consequences of the advocated behavior or the negative consequences of failing to do so. It has been claimed that people automatically generate a judgment about the message’s convincingness. We present the Perceived Convincingness Model (PCM) to explain how people generate this judgment based upon the fluency with which they process the message and the intensity of the resulting emotions. When these experiences are elicited by the processing of the message’s arguments, they can be crude, yet relevant indicators of the extent to which the arguments meet the normative criteria of acceptability, relevance, and sufficiency. Thus, under some conditions, trusting one’s feelings may be a rational strategy when deciding to heed an advice or not

Posture as Index for Approach-Avoidance Behavior

Approach and avoidance are two behavioral responses that make people tend to approach positive and avoid negative situations. This study examines whether postural behavior is influenced by the affective state of pictures. While standing on the Wii™ Balance Board, participants viewed pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant pictures (passively viewing phase). Then they had to move their body to the left or the right (lateral movement phase) to make the next picture appear. We recorded movements in the anterior-posterior direction to examine approach and avoidant behavior. During passively viewing, people approached pleasant pictures. They avoided unpleasant ones while they made a lateral movement. These findings provide support for the idea that we tend to approach positive and avoid negative situations

The Influence of Direct and Indirect Speech on Mental Representations

Language can be viewed as a set of cues that modulate the comprehender's thought processes. It is a very subtle instrument. For example, the literature suggests that people perceive direct speech (e.g., Joanne said: 'I went out for dinner last night') as more vivid and perceptually engaging than indirect speech (e.g., Joanne said that she went out for dinner last night). But how is this alleged vividness evident in comprehenders' mental representations? We sought to address this question in a series of experiments. Our results do not support the idea that, compared to indirect speech, direct speech enhances the accessibility of information from the communicative or the referential situation during comprehension. Neither do our results support the idea that the hypothesized more vivid experience of direct speech is caused by a switch from the visual to the auditory modality. However, our results do show that direct speech leads to a stronger mental representation of the exact wording of a sentence than does indirect speech. These results show that language has a more subtle influence on memory representations than was previously suggested