Although newspapers reported that a murder victim had been stabbed with a knife, two police investigators knew that the actual murder weapon was a letter opener. While carefully monitoring the changes in heart rate and perspiration level of a prime suspect, the investigators asked him if he typically used a letter opener on his mail. The investigators were making use of the

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The investigators were using a guilty knowledge test, a technique in which specific details known only to the perpetrator of a crime are used to test a suspect's knowledge and potential guilt. The investigators knew that the murder weapon was a letter opener, and by asking the suspect about his use of a letter opener for opening mail, they were testing whether he had this guilty knowledge. The Yerkes-Dodson law refers to the relationship between arousal and performance, the spillover effect involves the transfer of emotional arousal from one situation to another, and the unit bias relates to the tendency to consume a larger portion of food or drink when it is presented as a larger unit. None of these concepts apply to the scenario described.

Although Newspapers Reported That a Murder Victim Had Been Stabbed