The Impact of Leading Questions on Memory of Emotional Events - Arts and Humanities Assignment Help

Assignment Task

Abstract
The way questions are phrased can alter memory fornon-emotional events. The construction hypothesis proposes that this occurs as our original memory is altered to reflect question wording. The current study explores whether this effect extends to emotional events. Five-hundred and seventy university students viewed a video of a male and female having a heated discussion. Participants were asked, “How distressed was the female employee when they were fighting/disagreeing?” As expected, participants in the “fighting” condition recalled a greater level of distress compared to participants in the “disagreeing” condition. This suggests that the question wording merged with participant’s original memory, resulting in an altered memory of the distress demonstrated. This supports the construction hypothesis and has implications for eyewitness testimony. 
 
The Impact of Leading Questions on Memory of Emotional Events
The accuracy of memory has interested psychologists for many years, with this topic having practical applications in eyewitness testimony. One such phenomenon that has been explored is whether leading questions can impact our memory of an event (Weiten, 2013). A leading question is phrased in such a way that it suggests a particular response is correct (Loftus & Palmer, 1974). For example, the question “did you see the red car run the stop sign?” suggests to the respondent that the red car ran the stop sign and as such they may be encouraged to agree. 
Loftus (1975) suggested in the construction hypothesis that post-event information (i.e., information that we are exposed to after an event) could alter our memories by combining with our original memory for an event. As such, information provided in the form of leading questions could subsequently alter our recall of an event. Loftus and Palmer (1974) supported this theory by presenting participants with a video of a car-crash. After watching this, participants were asked, “How fast were the cars going when they hit/smashed each other?” This leading question influenced the speed that the participant recalled the cars travelling at, with those who viewed “smashed” stating that the cars were travelling at a greater speedthan those who viewed “hit”. Loftus and Palmer suggested that participants reconstructed their original memory to encompass the word presented in the leading question (i.e., “hit” or “smashed”). Specifically, as “smashed” implies the cars were travelling fast, exposure to this word may have encouraged participants to estimate a higher speed.
The research of Loftus and Palmer (1974) demonstrated how memory is fallible, however they only explored memories of non-emotional events involving inanimate objects (i.e., cars). Duringeyewitness testimony, it is important to be able to remember details of emotional events, and in particular to correctly recall other people’s emotions. As such, research examining whether memory for emotional events is malleable is required. Thus, the current study presents participants with a video of a heated discussion with the aim of exploring whether leading questions impact recall of people’s emotions. Based on the construction hypothesis, it is predicted that participants will attribute a greater level of distress to a female employee (as measured on a scale of 1-10) when presented with the more emotive word “fighting” in a leading question, than those presented with the less emotive word “disagreeing”.  
Method
Participants
Participants were 570 first year psychology students from the Melbourne, Brisbane, and Strathfield campuses of the Australian Catholic University.Of this sample, 34.3% were female and 65.7% were male, with an average age of 20.07 years (SD = 5.17). Students volunteered by attending their regular tutorial class.
Materials
A 2 minute 38 second YouTube video clip of a male employer and a female employee discussing the female’s work performance in a conference room was available for use. This interaction involved a heated discussion and thus could be seen as either a fight or a disagreement. 
Also available for use were two 10-item questionnaires: a “Fighting” questionnaire and a “Disagreeing” questionnaire. One critical question in each questionnaire differed depending on the condition. In the Fighting condition, the question was “How distressed do you think the female employee was when they were fighting?” while in the Disagreeing condition, the question asked “How distressed do you think the female employee was when they were disagreeing?” This was to be answered using a scale of 1 (not at all distressed) to 10 (extremely distressed). The nine remaining questions were filler items such as, “was there a blue flowerpot on the table” and “how angry do you think the male supervisor was?” These filler items were identical on both questionnaires and required a yes/no response. The questionnaire also contained items assessing age and gender.
Procedure
Participants were randomly allocated to the experimental condition, with approximately half in the Disagreeing condition and half in the Fighting condition. Upon entering the testing room, participants were informed that they were to watch a video of two people interacting and afterwards they would be asked to respond to a questionnaire about this video. As such, they were encouraged to pay close attention to the video. Before starting the video, participants were handed the questionnaire face down. Participants viewed the video and afterwards were instructed to complete the questionnaire. Participants were given as much time as they required to answer the questionnaire and were asked to do soin silence and individually. Upon completion of the questionnaire,participants were thanked and debriefed. 
Results
The mean distress rating was calculated for the disagreeing- and fighting-groups separately. The mean distress rating was higher in the fighting-group (M = 8.41, SD= 0.95) than in the disagreeing-group (M=7.59, SD =1.08). An independent groups t-test revealed that this difference across the groups was significant: t(564)=9.65, p<.05. 
Discussion
The aim of this study was to examine whether leading questions can affect our recall of emotional events. Participants were shown a video of a heated conversation between an employee and employer, and then completed a questionnaire which framed this discussion as either a “fight” or a “disagreement”. As expected, participants in the “fight” condition rated the female’s level of distress as greater than those in the “disagreement” condition. 
The difference in distress rating found between the “fight” and “disagreement” conditions can be explained by drawing upon the construction hypothesis (Loftus, 1975). Exposing participants to post-event information in the form of the question wordingmay have encouraged them to incorporate this new information into their original memory. Specifically, participantsthat were exposed to the word “fighting” may have been more likely to recallthe discussion as a fight, thus leading them to indicate a higher distress rating due to the intensity of a fight in comparisonto a disagreement. This illustrates that just as leading questions can impact our memories of non-emotional events (e.g., speed of cars; Loftus& Palmer, 1974), they can also affect our memory of emotional events. The current findings support and extend those of previous research (e.g., Loftus & Palmer, 1974) to include emotional events. As such,the findings demonstrate that the construction hypothesis also applies to emotional events, thus suggesting our memory for emotional events is malleable.
The current findings have further illuminated the impact leading questions have on our memories. However, there are a number of limitations that need to be considered which may cast doubt upon our conclusions. As can be seen from the participant characteristics, there were more female participants than male participants. This may have impacted the results obtained as the key protagonist was also female. Thus, it may be that the female participants empathised with this protagonist toa greater degreedue to sharing the same gender (e.g., Jones, 2001). As such, future research should consider whether there is a difference in the effect of leading questions depending upon whether the participant is male or female and whether the protagonist is male or female. A further limitation includes that the interaction on the video was obviously staged, which may have led the participants to have felt a lack of empathy for the female employee(e.g., Hillard &Williams, 2011) and therefore base their responses purely on the wording of the questionnaire. As such, it would be interesting to see whether using a “real-life” event may prompt different responses. Despite these limitations, a strength of the current study is that it is the first piece of research to consider the impact that leading questions may have on recall of emotional events, thus laying the groundwork for future research in this area.
In conclusion, this research has demonstrated that leading questions also impact people’s ability to recall details of an emotional event. Specifically, the current study found that leading questions affect an individual’s ability to remember another person’s emotion. This has direct implications for eyewitness testimonies as we are now aware that the questions asked after seeing an event can cause us to alter our memories of how distressed a person was feeling. As such, the guidelines concerning eyewitness testimony should take into account the impact of leading questions within this area. It is recommended that more research be conducted in this area to ascertain the extent to which leading questions can impact our memory of an emotional event. 

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