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Flashbulb Memories

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Flashbulb Memories

Flashbulb Memories are especially vivid memories created by highly-charged emotional events. Flashbulb Memories tend to encapsulate the surrounding context of the situation and not just the event itself. Flashbulb memories are so termed because they are were hypothesised to be like a photograph taken with a flash: burn immediately into the film or mind. In fact flashbulb memories are the closest that humans get to photographic or eidetic memory.

Brown and Kulik (1977) discovered flashbulb memories, they gave participants a questionnaire about the deaths of Kennedy, Malcolm ‘X’, Martin Luther King, and the day of Princess Diana’s death. Continue reading Flashbulb Memories →

Hazelwood and Douglas (1980) – ‘The Lust Murderer’

Forensic Psychology, Making a Case, Making a Profile, OCR A2 Psychology, , , , ,

Hazelwood and Douglas (1980) – ‘The Lust Murderer’, FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin 49 (4), 18-22.

Background

This is the first study we look at from the ‘Making a Profile’ section of ‘Making a case’. As part of your OCR A2 Psychology Exam. It is further categorised into ‘Top Down.’

This study is also referred to as:

  • Hazelwood et al., (1980)
  • Douglas et al., (1980)

Firstly, what is profiling? Profiling is a range of characteristics proposed by a psychologist of an offenders to the police in order to narrow the scope of their investigation.

The background study for this theory, is Holmes and Holmes (1989).

Firstly, what is profiling? Offender or criminal profiling is simply the attempt to predict and create the likely traits and behaviours of an offender of a crime. The likelihood is that you already could begin to have a guess at the type of person that committed a crime. For example three women are found strangled and sexually assaulted at three different, but closely located train stations. It is more than likely that a male committed these offences. Criminal profiling done by professionals is in essence what we just did, but it goes into more depth.

Holmes and Holmes (1989) identified 3 aims of profiling:

Continue reading Hazelwood and Douglas (1980) – ‘The Lust Murderer’ →