The Nature of Real,Implanted, and Fabricated Memories for Emotional Childhood Events: Implications for the Recovered Memory Debate

A central issue in the recovered memory debate is whether it is possible to remember a highly emotional incident which never occurred. The present study provided an in-depth investigation of real, implanted, and fabricated (deceptive) memories for stressful childhood events. We examined whether false memories for emotional events could be implanted and, if so, whether real, implanted, and fabricated memories had distinctive features. A questionnaire was sent to participants' parents asking about six highly emotional, stressful events (e.g., serious animal attack) which the participant may have experienced in childhood. Next, across three sessions, interviewers encouraged participants (N = 77) to recover a memory for a false event using guided imagery and repeated retrieval attempts. In the first interview, they were asked about one real and one false event, both introduced as true according to their parents. In two subsequent interviews, they were reinterviewed about the false event. Finally, after the third inquiry about the false event, participants were asked to fabricate a memory report. Results indicated that 26% of participants recovered a complete memory for the false experience and another 30% recalled aspects of the false experience. Real, implanted, and fabricated memories differed on several dimensions (e.g., confidence, vividness, details, repeated details, coherence, stress). These findings have important implications for the debate over recovered and false memories.     

Spatio-Temporal Interaction of Urban Crime

Over the past decade, a renewed interest in the analysis of crime hot-spots has emerged in the social and behavioral sciences. Spurred by improvements in computing power, data visualization and geographic information systems, numerous innovative approaches have materialized for identifying areas of elevated crime in urban environments. Unfortunately, many hot-spot analysis techniques treat the spatial and temporal aspects of crime as distinct entities, thus ignoring the necessary interaction of space and time to produce criminal opportunities. The purpose of this paper is to explore the utility of statistical measures for identifying and comparing the spatio-temporal footprints of robbery, burglary and assault. Functional and visual comparisons for spatio-temporal clusters are analyzed across a range of space–time values using a comprehensive database of crime events for Cincinnati, Ohio. Empirical results suggest that robbery, burglary and assault have dramatically different spatio-temporal signatures.