Negative Confession

Potential for False Confession

Recently, an alarmingly high incidence of wrongful convictions has been documented in the United States, in large part because of "Innocence Projects" that use DNA analyses from crime scenes to exonerate innocent persons. The best-known Innocence Project, administered through the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, has helped to free 138 people who had been wrongfully incarcerated. A...

Evolutionary psychology and false confession.

rankings/about/03human_meth.htm National Opinion Research Center. (1997). A review of the methodology for the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of undergraduate colleges and universities. Retrieved January 15, 2003, from the Washington Monthly Web site: www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/ 2000/norc.html Thompson, N. (2000, September). Playing with numbers: How U.S. News mismeasures higher edu...

Children's confession- and lying-related emotion expectancies: Developmental differences and connections to parent-reported confession behavior.

Young children understand that lying is wrong, yet little is known about the emotions children connect to the acts of lying and confessing and how children's emotion expectancies relate to real-world behavior. In the current study, 4- to 9-year-old children (N=48) heard stories about protagonists (a) committing transgressions, (b) failing to disclose their misdeeds, and (c) subsequently lying o...

The case of the confidential confession: psychiatry.

Confession, in-service training and reflective practices

This article focuses on how confession operates in contemporary discourses on reflective practices. By revisiting and mobilising Foucault’s genealogy of confession in relation to how reflective practices are mobilised in an in-service training programme for health care assistants (HCA) in elderly care, it is argued that the HCAs are shaped as their own confessors. It is further argued that we n...