Chapter 5
This process uses information from a crime scene to draw conclusions about a suspect’s personality, behavior, motivation, and demographic characteristics.
What is profiling
This is the first step in memory processing, when information is gathered and transformed into a form that can be used and remembered later.
What is encoding
Children who later withdraw or recant their earlier allegations of sexual abuse are more likely to have been abused by someone in this role, rather than by a stranger.
What is a parental figure
This principle suggests that as time passes, a serial offender’s crimes may spread over an increasingly larger geographical area.
What is distance decay
This technology uses hundreds of measurements to create a unique map of a person’s face, allowing computers to identify individuals from images captured by cameras.
What is facial recognition technology
Research on traumatic events suggests that most victims retain these types of memories of what happened, rather than completely repressing or later recovering them.
What are vivid memories
These killers tend to be more impulsive, leave more evidence behind, and select their victims in a more random or opportunistic manner.
What are disorganized killers
This effect describes the tendency for people to recognize and remember faces from their own racial group more accurately than faces from other racial groups.
What is the cross-race effect
This revised interview protocol guides investigators toward open-ended, non-suggestive questions and includes introductory, ground-rules, and substantive phases, with follow-up questions used to obtain additional information.
What is the NICHD Investigative Interview Revised Protocol?
Unlike methods based on formal psychological testing, psychological profiling relies heavily on the profiler’s ability to make informed judgments based on experience and patterns of behavior.
What is Skilled Intuition
When identifying or describing a suspect, eyewitnesses rely on this psychological process to recall what they saw during an event.
What is memory
Proposed by Summit, this controversial clinical framework describes how feelings of helplessness, confusion, and fear may contribute to children concealing abuse, delaying disclosure, denying the abuse, or later recanting their allegations.
What is Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome (CSAAS)?
This childhood behavior, involving deliberate harm toward nonhuman creatures, has been identified as a characteristic of childhood maladjustment in the histories of quite a few serial killers.
What is cruelty to animals
This stage of memory involves accessing information that has already been stored and bringing it back to mind when needed.
What is retrieval
Research by Loftus and Hyman demonstrates that this type of memory can sometimes be implanted with relatively little effort, while genuine recovered memories may also occur spontaneously.
What are false memories