Research Paper on:
False Memories

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
to recall memories he thinks happened but actually did not. This notion of creating false memories has people summoning up inaccurate details of important circumstances, serving to skew the  truth and often create significant problems where, for example, eyewitness testimony is concerned. The inherent fallibility of eyewitness testimony has been the focus of myriad debates, inasmuch as research illustrates  how first-hand observers are easily distracted by certain lines of questioning clearly indicate how their recollection becomes skewed and the answers they provide somehow mesh with what they perceive to  be the truth. Elizabeth Loftus has spent considerable time tracking this particular phenomenon, noting how details become more readily available in conjunction with repeated and exhaustive questioning; as such,  the eyewitnesss answers no longer pertain to the events that occurred, but rather to the questions that are being asked. "We live in a strange and precarious time that  resembles at its heart the hysteria and superstitious fervor of the witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Men and women are being accused, tried, and convicted with  no proof or evidence of guilt other than the word of the accuser" (Loftus 1-14). Employing recovered memories has proven to be an even more dangerous approach to getting  at the truth in a court case, being that the fairly recent trend toward psychotherapy has rendered myriad individuals with false memories of things that either did not take place  or whose truths have been so horribly altered that all that can be retrieved is a smattering of recollection. The techniques by which this often erroneous information is extracted  have come under fire of late, standing accused of instigating the repressed - if not faulty - memories that have all too readily put innocent people behind bars. "Therapists