It has been suggested that hypnosis techniques may have the potential to enhance eyewitness memory in forensic investigations. However, laboratory research shows that increases in recall with hypnosis techniques are often associated with decreases in accuracy, false conยฎdence in incorrect information, and increased suggestibility to leading questions and misleading post-event information. These problems limit the usefulness of hypnosis as an interviewing procedure. However, in practical investigations, many factors associated with hypnosis, apart from the hypnotic induction itself, might lead to memory enhancement compared with standard police interviews. For example, hypnotic interviewers, because of their psychological, clinical, and interpersonal skills, may be better interviewers than police ocers. They may use eective interviewing strategies such as those associated with the ``cognitive interview''; a procedure which has the potential to enhance recall by approximately 35% without the problems of memory distortion associated with hypnosis. It is concluded, therefore, that a cognitive interview procedure should be used in preference to hypnosis. # 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Eyewitnesses play an important part in many police investigations but they rarely remember as much as the police would like (Kebbell and Milne, in press; Rand Corporation, 1975). Consequently, forensic psychologists have devoted a great deal of time and energy to devising ways of improving eyewitness memory. Over the last three decades considerable interest has been shown in the possibility of using hypnosis as a memory enhancement procedure, and a number of researchers and practitioners have claimed that hypnosis has proved useful in actual police investigations (