Abstract
The nature of amnesia in the context of crime has been the subject of a prolonged debate. It is not uncommon that after committing a violent crime, the offender either does not have any memory of the event or recalls it with some gaps in its recollection. A number of studies have been conducted in order to differentiate between simulated and genuine amnesia. The recognition of probable malingering requires several inferential methods. For instance, it typically involves the defendant’s medical records, self-reports, the observed behavior, and the results of a comprehensive neuropsychological examination. In addition, a variety of procedures that may detect very specific malingered amnesia in crime have been developed. In this paper, we investigated the efficacy of three techniques, facial thermography, kinematic analysis, and symptom validity testing in detecting malingering of amnesia in crime. Participants were randomly assigned to two different experimental conditions: a group was instructed to simulate amnesia after a mock homicide, and a second group was simply asked to behave honestly after committing the mock homicide. The outcomes show that kinematic analysis and symptom validity testing achieve significant accuracy in detecting feigned amnesia, while thermal imaging does not provide converging evidence. Results are encouraging and may provide a first step towards the application of these procedures in a multimethod approach on crime-specific cases of amnesia.
Highlights
Crime-related amnesia is a controversial problem and the subject of a prolonged debate [1,2,3,4,5]
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the efficacy of three emerging techniques in evaluating crime-related amnesia, i.e., thermal imaging, kinematic analysis, and symptom validity testing (SVT), in a group of subjects invited to simulate, or not, amnesia following a mock homicide
These data contrast with results obtained in previous studies [e.g., Refs. [38, 40]] where an increase in facial temperature was found in deceptive participants
Summary
Crime-related amnesia is a controversial problem and the subject of a prolonged debate [1,2,3,4,5]. Tracing the history of the phenomenon, the interesting stories of crime-related amnesia of Rudolf Hess [9] and Guenther Podola [10] can be found, where amnesia seems easy to pretend and difficult to disprove, and it arises as part of a defense strategy using loss of memory as mental incompetency to stand trial [11]. Forensic experts, and judges though are skeptical about the development of such an authentic crimerelated amnesia. Notwithstanding this marked skepticism, researchers demonstrate that, apart from malingering, some cases of crime-related amnesia are genuine and could be attributed to a range of temporary brain dysfunctions. A partial or complete recovery of memories is possible [19]
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