Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

Suggestibility: Empirical Findings 387
(ages 11–16 years) who had been independently rated by two teachers on
measures of suggestibility and self-esteem. The teachers’ behavioural ratings
of suggestibility correlated highly significantly with the GSS 1 Shift score.
Furthermore, one of the items from the Coopersmith Behaviour Rating Form
(Coopersmith, 1967), which is a measure of self-esteem rated by independent
informants, correlated highly significantly with the GSS 1 Shift score. The question
asked was ‘Does this child become alarmed and frightened easily?’ (rated
on a five-point Likert scale). This finding suggests that Shift is a measure of
how readily the person becomes frightened when in the company of others.
Further evidence that Shift is related to how subjects cope with pressure
emerges from a study (Gudjonsson, 1984c) where it was found that Shift correlated
negatively (r =−0.37, df = 48, p < 0.05) with the Ego score as measured
by the Arrow-Dot Test (Dombrose & Slobin, 1958). No significant correlation
was found for Yield 1. The Arrow-Dot Test is a perceptual–motor task, which
requires the solution of 23 simple graphic problems whilst subjects are placed
under time pressure.
Studying anxiety from a different perspective, I investigated the relationship
between suggestibility and social-evaluative anxiety (Gudjonsson, 1988a).
The latter was measured by the Fear of Negative Evaluation (FNE) and Social
Avoidance and Distress (SAD) scales of Watson and Friend (1969).
In view of the fact that people who score high on the FNE are prone to become
apprehensive in evaluative situations and attempt to avoid social disapproval,
it would be expected that they are more susceptible to suggestive influences
than low FNE scorers. The theoretical reasoning for a relationship between the
SAD and suggestibility is less clear, except that social distress may relate to
how people respond to negative feedback.
It was found that the FNE scores correlated significantly with all the GSS
1 suggestibility scores, whereas no significant correlations were found for the
SAD scale. The results support the view that interrogative suggestibility is
more strongly associated with fear of negative evaluation than social distress.
Hansdottir, Thorsteinsson, Kristinsdottir and Ragnarsson (1990) attempted
to study the effects of anxiety and instructional manipulation on suggestibility
by a way of experimental manipulation. Forty subjects were divided into four
experimental groups. At the beginning of the experiment half the subjects were
instructed to imagine as vividly as they could a stress-provoking situation and
immediately afterwards listened to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to further their
anxiety. The other half of the subjects listened to neutral music only. The ‘anxious’
and ‘neutral’ subjects were then divided into two further groups and given
either a low or a high expectation about their performance on the GSS 1.
It was found that situational stress only had significant effect on suggestibility
in the low expectation group. The authors point out that one explanation
for this finding is that the high expectation instruction created performance
anxiety in the subjects, which was similar to the anxiety generated by the anxiety
manipulation. Administering the anxiety manipulation in addition to the
high expectation instruction had no significant effect. Similarly, instructional
manipulation did not significantly increase suggestibility among subjects who
had been previously aroused by anxiety manipulation.