Emotional Memories Across Cultures: Comparing Statements from West Africans and Western Europeans Provided in Mock Asylum Interviews

We will conduct mock asylum interviews. 64 West African participants, of which 32 will be recruited in rural Ghana and 32 in urban Ghana, and 64 matched Western European participants will be questioned about an emotional life event, using interview questions similar to the type of questions posed by immigration officials in an asylum interview. There will be two interviewers starting the session simultaneously. The interview will start with a free recall of the event and followed by four predetermined open-ended follow-up questions. Next, participants will complete a filler task (watching a mock crime video related to another experiment). Afterwards, participants take part in a short “knowledge test”, in which questions are asked about certain aspects of their country and home town. For example, participants are asked to describe the appearance of their identity documents, license plates, and landmarks. Those kinds of questions are often asked in asylum interviews because immigration officials seem to believe that the answers to such questions can discriminate between credible and noncredible asylum claims (Van Veldhuizen et al., 2018). Before the next phase of the session, the two interviewers will swap positions. Participants are then asked by the new interviewer to repeat their story about their emotional life event as if they have moved to another country and are interviewed by an immigration official. It will be a repetition of the free recall and the same open-ended follow-up questions. Next, participants complete another filler tasks (line-ups related to the mock crime video they viewed earlier). Finally, participants complete the personal cultural orientation test (Sharma, 2010) and a short questionnaire about their demographics. The interviews will be transcribed and coded. We will code quantitative characteristics such as the number of words and the number of details, and qualitative characteristics such as the content, emotionality, specificity, and self-other focus of the memory reports. We will also code for consistency between the two repeated statements, such as the number of omissions, commissions, repetitions and contradictions (Vredeveldt et al., 2014).