The purpose of Therapeutic Jurisprudence (TJ) is to execute legal procedures such that they promote the social and psychological well-being of the individual involved in a juridical action. TJ may be a facilitating factor in the police interview. Previous studies  have shown a relation between a humanitarian interviewing approach and suspects inclination to confess as well as crime victims narrate all what they can remember from a crime event (see e.g., Gudjonsson, 2006; Holmberg 2004; Holmberg & Christianson, 2002; Kebbell et al., 2006; Kebbell et al., 2008). The humanitarian experiences of the people involved in judicial actions seem to promote a therapeutic jurisprudential psychological well-being that might act as a rehabilitating factor.

The aim of the present experimental study was to investigate the causal relationship between the humanitarian respectively the dominant interviewing approach and interview outcomes. With interview outcomes mean the memory performance and psychological well-being. The experiment comprised three phases and 127 subjects between 17 and 70 years old participated in these three phases. The first phase was an exposure where the subjects in pairs acted against each other in a computer simulation with a scenario symbolizing a crime event. During the simulation, half of the subjects got the opportunity to steel from the opposite party. A week after the exposure phase, the subjects were interviewed in a humanitarian or a dominant style symbolizing a police interview after a crime event. Sex month later, the subjects were interviewed again in the same manner, symbolizing the interview in the court proceeding. Before the exposure phase, the subject completed Spielberger’s stait-trait anxiety inventory (STAI) – trait form and Rammstedt & John’s the 10-Item Big Five Inventory. Before after every phase, the participants completed Antonovsky’s sense of coherence questionnaire and Spielberger’s STAI – the state form. After the interviews the participants also completed a questionnaire that measured whether the interviews were perceived as humanitarian or dominant. Preliminary results, since a part of the interviews has been analyzed, show that acting in the computer simulation affected the subjects’ mood. Results indicate that the humanitarian interviewing approach result in a higher memory performance and a higher psychological well-being compared to the dominant interviewing style. The results from the analyzes of the compete sample will be presented and discussed.