Angry Voices from the Past and Present: Effects on Adults’ and Children’s Earwitness Memory
Lisa Öhman, Anders Eriksson and Pär Anders Granhag

A critical review

Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling

2013 Volume 10, Issue 1, Pages 57 – 70

Word count: 3347

As the old adage goes ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. Often for investigating officers, eye witness testimony and what is seen, is heavily relied on in order to prosecute crimes (Wells and Olsen, 2003). As such eye witness testimony and memory has become one of the most researched areas in Cognitive Psychology. What can be quite disconcerting is that from the research conducted into this
However it is stated that as far as Öhman et al (2013) were aware no research had been done on the “effects of tone of voice on child witnesses”, showing that this particular study is moving research forward and opening up an area for development. After all it is important we keep in mind children as witnesses and conduct investigations into how to get the most accurate information possible from them. Unfortunately the literature review was quite unrefined and did lack some consistency. Due to there being 4 factors there was a large theoretical framework, much of it relevant and from 2000 onwards. However in some areas it felt like a list of studies that had just been read, rather than considered for their value to the subject, but there were certain aspects that the authors did develop. For example children’s’ cognitive development, the effects and possible explanations are clearly stated with research to bring it into context for investigations. On the other hand, for the effects of time delay the authors wrote “other studies, however, have shown that voice identification accuracy declines over time (Clifford, 1980)”. There does seem to be a serious lack of research into aural memory, and the research there is, is done on short term memory which is maybe not applicable since this is discussing accuracy declining over time. However a line explaining that we do not understand this