The aim of torture is to cause severe pain and suffering in order to destroy the structure of the personality and the identity of the victim. Torture is applied in over a 100 countries worldwide, and its consequences affect millions of survivors. The ...

Torture has been defined most precisely in legal contexts. Practitioners who work with torture survivors and researchers who study torture have frequently cited legal definitions, particularly those in the United States’ Torture Victims Relief Act, the ...

After 9–11, the United States began interrogating detainees at settings such as Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo. The American Psychological Association (APA) supported psychologists’ involvement in interrogations, adopted formal policies, and made an ...

There is a widespread and popularly-held belief that the imposition of extreme stressor states (torture) is efficacious at facilitating the release of intentionally-withheld information from (human) memory. Here, I explore why this belief is so ...

Traumatic stressors such as water boarding, electric shock, or false execution all activate similar bodily, affective, and cognitive responses even when they are quite different from one another. As a result, the memory traces merge into a “trauma network”...

Dehumanized perception, a failure to spontaneously consider the mind of another person, may be a psychological mechanism facilitating inhumane acts like torture. Social cognition – considering someone’s mind – recognizes the other as a human being subject ...

Several successful research traditions in the psychology of revenge and punishment have developed in German-speaking psychology over the last two decades. They have provided insights into topics such as retributive justice and social discrimination or ...