Gísli Guðjónsson

Gísli Hannes Guðjónsson, CBE (born 26 October 1947) is an Icelandic Professor of Forensic Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry of King's College London. He is an internationally renowned authority on suggestibility and false confessions whose expert testimony was the basis for the convictions of the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four being overturned. He created the Gudjonsson suggestibility scale to measure how susceptible someone is to coercion during an interrogation.

Biography

He was born on 26 October 1947, and educated at Brunel University London (BSc, 1975) and the University of Surrey (MSc, 1977; PhD, 1981).^[1]

In 1982, he coined the term memory distrust syndrome, to describe those who distrust their own memories and are motivated to rely on external (non-self) sources to verify the accuracy of memories.

He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to clinical psychology.^[2][3]

Selected list of publications

• Psychology brings justice: the science of forensic psychology (Crim Behav Ment Health. 2003;13(3):159-67)
• The Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions. A Handbook. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. (2003)
• Forensic Psychology. A Guide to Practice (with Lionel Haward)
• The relationship between confabulation and intellectual ability, memory, interrogative suggestibility and acquiescence. (Personality and Individual Differences, 1995)
• The Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scales Manual. Hove, UK: Psychology Press. (1997)
• The Relationship Of Alcohol Withdrawal Symptoms To Suggestibility And Compliance. (Psychology, Crime & Law, June 2004, Vol. 10(2), pp. 169/177)

See also

• Memory distrust syndrome

References