Presenter: BC Skeptics and Department of Psychology
Title: Between the Devil and the Media: A Critique of Alleged Subliminal Satanic Messages in Rock Music
Speaker: Dr. J. Don Read
Date: 7:30 pm, 4 December 2001
Location: The Halpern Center, Simon Fraser University
Admission: Open to public. Free.

When media scares alleging that certain rock musicians were embedding backward-masked subliminal satanic messages into their recordings, parental panic, clerical dismay (and a few lawsuits) sprang up in their wake. Not content to criticize these misguided assertions on logical and general scientific grounds, John Vokey and Don Read, then both in the Psychology Department at the University of Lethbridge, set out to test the scare-mongers' claims directly. Their informative and highly entertaining paper describing their investigation was published in the APA journal, American Psychologist, and became an instant classic.

Don Read will recount the history of this "moral panic" and demonstrate the actual stimulus tapes he and John Vokey manufactured which caught the crusading ministers with their frocks down. In so doing, Don will discuss the role of media coverage in fomenting these kinds of public hysteria and the quirks of human psychology that make many people vulnerable to such scares.

Don Read is an internationally-known authority in forensic psychology who has published widely areas such as the fallibility of eye-witness testimony, false memory syndrome, and how to determine the veracity of children's testimony. He was one of the featured speakers at the 1994 conference on "recovered memories" organized by Barry Beyerstein and James Ogloff.

All the foregoing events will be held at the Halpern Centre, SFU. The Halpern Centre is between the Library and the Robert C. Brown Classroom Building at Simon Fraser University. Campus maps, with visitor parking and wheelchair access indicated, are available at: www.sfu.ca. For more information, contact Barry Beyerstein at 604-291-3743 or bbeyerstein@arts.sfu.ca.