Abstract
The Concealed Information Test (CIT) aims to detect the presence of crime-related information in memory. In two experiments, we examined the influence of stimulus emotionality on the outcomes of the CIT. In experiment 1, each participant was tested immediately or after one week, on a series of neutral and either negative arousing or negative non-arousing pictures. CIT detection efficiency was unaffected, but physiological and recognition data did not support the manipulation's effectiveness. In experiment 2, each participant was tested after a week on a series of neutral versus negative arousing pictures. Importantly, stimulus arousal was increased and memory ceiling effects were prevented. This time, both memory and CIT detection efficiency using the skin conductance, but not the respiration and heart rate measures, were enhanced for emotional compared to neutral pictures. Taken together, these results indicate that the use of emotional stimuli does not deteriorate and may even improve CIT validity.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 25-35 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Biological Psychology |
| Volume | 129 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2017 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research was funded by a grant, No. 238/15, from the Israel Science Foundation to Gershon Ben-Shakhar. The original data and analysis files are publically available on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/qxe58/. We wish to thank Adi Dan, Aya Navot, Noa Feldman, Shani Vaknine, Eli Rosner and Naama Agari for their assistance in data collection.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Elsevier B.V.
Keywords
- Arousal
- External validity
- Heart rate (HR)
- Respiration line length (RLL)
- Skin conductance response (SCR)
- The concealed information test (CIT)
- Valence
