Stress, stress‐induced cortisol responses, and eyewitness identification performance

Abstract

In the eyewitness identification literature, stress and arousal at the time of encoding are considered to adversely influence identification performance. This assumption is in contrast with findings from the neurobiology field of learning and memory, showing that stress and stress hormones are critically involved in forming enduring memories. This discrepancy may be related to methodological differences between the two fields of research, such as the tendency for immediate testing or the use of very short (1–2 hours) retention intervals in eyewitness research, while neurobiology studies insert at least 24 hours. Other differences refer to the extent to which stress‐responsive systems (i.e., the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis) are stimulated effectively under laboratory conditions. The aim of the current study was to conduct an experiment that accounts for the contemporary state of knowledge in both fields. In all, 123 participants witnessed a live staged theft while being exposed to a laboratory stressor that reliably elicits autonomic and glucocorticoid stress responses or while performing a control task. Salivary cortisol levels were measured to control for the effectiveness of the stress induction. One week later, participants attempted to identify the thief from target‐present and target‐absent line‐ups. According to regression and receiver operating characteristic analyses, stress did not have robust detrimental effects on identification performance. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. © 2016 The Authors Behavioral Sciences & the Law Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Eyewitness Evidence Obtained with the Self‐Administered Interview© Is Unaffected by Stress

“…One week later, participants returned for a second session to identify the confederate in a lineup. The eyewitness identification results are unrelated to our research question and reported elsewhere (see Sauerland et al, 2015).…”

Developmental trends in lineup performance: Adolescents are more prone to innocent bystander misidentifications than children and adults

“…Only significant comparisons are reported. The referring statistics will not be reported in the text, but can be found in Tables 3-5. Two ways of handling don't-know responses were possible: treating them as missing values or coding them as lineup rejections (see Sauerland et al, 2016, for a similar approach). We conducted both analyses, and this resulted in analogous outcomes.…”

Eyewitness identifications after witnessing threatening and non-threatening scenes in 360-degree virtual reality (or 2D) from first and third person perspectives

“…This was based on research showing that VR can be used to create high degree of realness and believable events [18]. Moreover, due to questions concerning underestimated effects from laboratory-based 2D studies [4] and the suggestion that a 2D method might not be a suitable for investigating effects of stress on eyewitness accuracy [16], we were interested in creating a proof of concept design that would be more comparable with a real life setting.…”

“…The implications are that 2D video is lacking in both realness and immersion and this means that 2D video fails to elicit emotional reactions that are comparable to real life, which in turn leads to small effects. Sauerland and colleagues [16] also state that very few eyewitness studies (in contrast to neurological studies) have investigated stress with objective measures, relying instead on subjective assessments. This further complicates the comparison between 2D and real life, leaving a gap in the field that has not been sufficiently investigated.…”

“…A relatively recent meta-analysis [ 15 ] also illustrates that when a stressor and a stimulus are closely connected this leads to enhanced memory encoding. The somewhat contradictory findings may be due to the video-based method that is frequently used in eyewitness research; a method which might not adequately elicit high arousal closely associated with, for example, a perpetrator in a 2D video [ 16 ]. This indicates that in certain cases, such as, when investigating the effects of stress on eyewitness accuracy, the results from a 2D experimental setup might not be consistent with real-life scenarios.…”