Summary

Dr Lawrence Patihis, PhD is a psychological scientist who specializes in memory reliability, often in legal contexts. His doctoral advisor was Elizabeth Loftus, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow at the highly ranked psychology department at the University of California, Irvine, USA. He has published research in prestigious journals such as PNAS, Psychological Science, and Clinical Psychological Science. 

His research on memory and beliefs about memory has been cited thousands of times. This research has made a few discoveries about how memory works: including how memory reconstruction works in Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory individuals, how appraisals seem to distort memory of emotions, and how false memories are formed. His other branch of research has helped reveal the extent of beliefs about repressed memories in practioners, scientists, and the public, as well as the prevalence of repressed memory recovery in psychotherapy. He has also published on dissociative amnesia and evolution.

He teaches a module called Trauma, Memory, and Law, that discusses false memories, some legal case studies, memory reliability, and to what degree repressed memories should be admissible in legal cases. This is an option that forensic psychology students can choose in their final year. He has published a book of the same name. With students in mind, he has also created a critical thinking tools podcast, which discusses how to distinguish science from pseudoscience, and testable theory from ideology.

Dr Patihis in available as an expert witness on legal cases on the topic of memory reliability, and is the director of the Memory in Life, Practice, and Law (MLPL) laboratory.

Dr Patihis is also an advisory board member of Academics for Academic Freedom, and the cofounder of Portsmouth Academics for Academic Freedom.