After the last blood collection, the participants were debriefed to explain that their performance "was not" and "will not be" evaluated and that the only purpose of the TSST was to initiate a stress reaction.
"They have the expertise and are the ones that debriefed and trusted Brian," Emery said in a telephone interview, referring to Novitzky and the prosecutors.
Indeed, most randomised controlled trials (RCTs) indicated that debriefed and non-debriefed trauma survivors did not differ in terms of symptoms at follow-up, whereas in other RCTs debriefing actually impeded natural recovery from trauma; non-debriefed survivors were doing better psychologically at follow-up than the debriefed ones.
Occasionally, on the pretext of a business trip, he traveled to Belgium and Italy, received an Israeli passport, and flew to Israel, where he was debriefed at length, investigators say.
They were to be evaluated and debriefed, but had communicated that everyone was in good health.
They received gossip from a colleague that a third person either did very well or very badly at a performance evaluation, and were then debriefed about the emotions that information evoked.
Sergeant Nicholson said that the informant had been debriefed and had undergone a background check, and that he had agreed not to commit further crimes — a condition he violated when he was later arrested in a theft case.
"Sometimes when we put people in a group and debriefed them, we gave them memories that they didn't have," he told me.
To that end, Coaches completed daily evaluations and were debriefed as a group at the end of each day during Academy meetings, Research Associates compiled field notes on the approaches used by their Coaches, and individual interviews were conducted with Coaches after the Academy meetings and semi-annually between meetings.
After scanning, participants were debriefed and asked about the navigational strategies that they adopted (for details of the postscan debriefing procedure, see the Supplemental Data).
