Members in the Media
From: New York Magazine

Psychologists Analyzed a Big Collection of Condemned Inmates’ Last Words

New York Magazine:

It’s a strange and uncomfortable exercise: Imagine you’re about to be executed, and you’re given the opportunity to make a final statement. What would your last words be? To psychologists who study how humans cope with fear and death, condemned inmates’ final statements are — setting aside the ick factor — a rich potential source of information. There are few other situations in which you can hear the thoughts of someone who knows they will be dead in a few minutes.

In a new paper in Frontiers in Psychology, the researchers Dr. Sarah Hirschmüller and Dr. Boris Egloff tap a rich source of these statements — the state of Texas — to better understand how condemned inmates make sense of what has happened, and is about to happen, to them.

Read the whole story: New York Magazine

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