Teachers can incorporate topics in forensic psychology into lower level courses to increase student interest and to show how psychological processes influence outcomes in high-stakes applied contexts. One such topic is eyewitness identification, which teachers can use to show how stress affects memory and how memories can become distorted during encoding, storage, retrieval, and even postretrieval. A second topic is lie detection, which teachers can use to illustrate the limits of our ability to interpret the nonverbal behavior of others. Lie detection also illustrates the use and misuse of physiological measures (polygraph, functional magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalogram) as indicators of psychological states. Like memory errors by eyewitnesses, the limitations of lie detection can lead to innocent people being accused and convicted of crimes they did not commit.
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