Written Assignment Unit 4 PDF

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The Case of Eileen Franklin On November 25, 1989, Eileen Franklin accused George Franklin, her father, of raping and murdering her best friend by the name of Susan Nason 20 years ago. Eileen came forward with the accusation 20 years after her best friend Susan was murdered and police could not identify the perpetrator. One day, Eileen Franklin was playing with her children, a son, and a daughter. When her daughter’s innocent eyes reminded her of her best friend’s. That is when a repressed memory came to light. She stated that she saw who the criminal was and stated that it was her father, George Franklin. She said that her repressed memory had been unlocked. George was arrested but kept proclaiming that he is innocent. A women professor from California UC Irvine by the name of Elizabeth F. Loftus came to investigate the case. She found holes in Eileen’s story as the facts from her perspective kept changing and the time of the crime was not accurate. Elizabeth also asked herself the obvious question of why Eileen was silent for 20 years despite witnessing her best friend’s murder. She was convinced that Eileen’s story was some sort of false memory or a made-up story (Loftus & Ketcham, 1994). Elizabeth could not conclude the case just using her hypothesis so she decided to conduct an experiment. She used 20 participants for her experiment and told asked each participant four things they remember from their childhood. The participants responded to this question with incidents like skating with their parents, breaking an ankle while playing sports, and more. The twist in this experiment was that Elizabeth instructed the parents of the participants to plant a false memory into their children about getting lost in the mall when they were a child and a man came to their rescue and helped them find their parents. Surprisingly, 25% of the participants answered that false memory like a real one in the question (Brunch, 2017). This experiment

helped Elizabeth F. Loftus that Eileen’s testimony was created from false memory and George Franklin was set free. I am a firm believer that repressed memories exist and they mainly exist to cover painful or traumatic experiences that happened in the past. I have had a few acquaintances that are younger than me, who went through unfortunate major traumas. Their testimony of the events, events that I also happened to witness, is different from the truth. It can be hard to tell them the truth because I have seen it before and it can be lifechanging. Uncovering a repressed memory is highly dangerous. As our brain represses those memories to keep our psyche intact, it truly needs great research and experience before trying to uncover a repressed memory. The consequences of uncovering a repressed memory without proper preparation can be quite traumatic. On the other hand, a lot of innocent people have suffered, been accused, or suffered because of false memory and repressed memory (Loftus, 2013).

References Loftus, E., & Ketcham, K. (1994). The Myth of Repressed Memory. Retrieved from https://staff.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/Cosmo.html Penvas. (2017). False Memory. Brunch. Retrieved from https://brunch.co.kr/@penvas/22 Loftus, E. (2013). False Memory. TED Global. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_the_fiction_of_memory/transcript?language=en...