The effects of whispers,voice-sample duration,and voice distinctiveness on criminal speaker identification

A total of 156 introductory psychology students heard a taped voice of a mock kidnapper for either 30 seconds or 8 minutes. The kidnapper had either a distinctive voice or a non-distinctive voice, and spoke either in a whisper or in a normal tone of voice. Voice identification from six-person, tape-recorded lineups was tested 2 days later. Participants who initially heard the perpetrator speak in a normal tone were tested with normal tone lineups. Participants who initially heard the perpetrator speak in a whisper were tested either with whispered lineups or normal tone lineups. Results showed that identification performance was superior with longer voice-sample durations. Voice disguise through whispering, distinctiveness of suspect's voice, and changes in tone of voice from initial hearing and lineup test significantly influenced identification performance on both suspect-present and suspect-absent lineups. Small but significant accuracy-confidence correlations were found in both suspect-present and suspect-absent lineups. Duration estimations of the length of the speaker's voice-sample were overestimated, particularly for the short 30-second voice sample.     

The impact of proficiency testing information and error aversions on the weight given to fingerprint evidence

Fingerprint examiners regularly participate in tests designed to assess their proficiency. These tests provide information relevant to the weight of fingerprint evidence, but no prior research has directly examined how jurors react to proficiency testing information. Using a nationally representative sample of American adults, we examined the impact of proficiency testing information on the weight given to the opinions of fingerprint examiners by mock jurors considering a hypothetical criminal case. The fingerprint examiner's level of performance on a proficiency test (high, medium, low, or very low), but not the type of error committed on the test (false positive identifications, false negative identifications, or a mix of both types of error), affected the weight that jury‐eligible adults gave to an examiner's opinion that latent fingerprints recovered from a crime scene matched the defendant's fingerprints, which in turn affected judgments about the defendant's guilt. Jurors who had no information about proficiency gave similar weight to the testimony as jurors exposed to highly proficient examiners, suggesting that jurors assume fingerprint examiners perform at high levels of proficiency unless informed otherwise. We also found that a plurality of Americans deems false acquittals just as aversive as false convictions and a significant minority deems false acquittals more serious. These differences in error aversions predicted differences in evidentiary assessments, suggesting that error aversions of jurors may play an important role in criminal trials.     

Police officers' use of evidence to elicit admissions in a fictitious criminal case

We examined how police officers planned to interview suspects in a situation where they lacked information about a critical phase of a crime (i.e., the time during which the crime took place) but possessed information about less critical phases of the crime (i.e., the time before and/or after the crime took place). The main focus was the officers' planned use of the available information (evidence) to elicit admissions about the critical phase. A survey was distributed to police officers (n  = 69) containing a fictitious murder case for which they were to prepare an interview with a suspect. The investigators planned to disclose the evidence more often in a strategic manner (obtaining the suspect's statement and exhausting alternative scenarios before revealing the evidence) than in a non‐strategic manner (revealing the evidence before requiring an explanation). The investigators' most frequently reported reason for their planned evidence use was to collect additional information about the particular phase to which the disclosed evidence pertained. It was rare that the investigators planned to disclose the evidence about a less critical phase of the crime in order to elicit admissions about the more critical phase (e.g., by disclosing the evidence to try to shift the suspect's counter‐interrogation strategy from less to more forthcoming). The investigators may benefit from recent research showing that strategic evidence disclosure can be used as a means to elicit admissions about a phase of a crime for which information is lacking.     

Evidence Evaluation and Evidence Integration in Legal Decision‐Making: Order of Evidence Presentation as a Moderator of Context Effects

Legal decision‐making studies often demonstrate context effects: People's initial beliefs about a suspect's guilt influence their evaluation of subsequent evidence. We examine three potential moderators of these context effects: Order of evidence presentation, ability to ruminate, and valence of the initial belief (innocence or guilt). College students (n = 382) were presented with DNA evidence (incriminating or exonerating) and an ambiguous alibi in one of two orders (or just the alibi), and then evaluated how strongly the alibi incriminated the suspect and the suspect's likelihood of guilt. Results indicated that alibi evaluation exhibited context effects when (i) initial beliefs were of guilt (but not of innocence) and when (ii) evaluating subsequent evidence (but not when retroactively evaluating prior evidence). Rumination failed to moderate any effects. The integration of evidence exhibited recency effects: DNA had a greater impact on participants' beliefs in the suspect's guilt when presented last rather than first. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Presence of administrators differentially impacts eyewitness discriminability for same- and other-race identifications

Best practice guidelines recommend that eyewitness lineup administrators be blind to a suspect's identity, but no research has investigated whether the mere presence of a lineup administrator impacts eyewitness identification decisions. Informed by social facilitation theory, we predicted that the presence of an audience would differentially impact identification accuracy for same- and other-race identifications. Participants (N = 191) viewed same- and other-race lineups either with an audience or alone. Although the presence of an audience did not directly impact identification accuracy, significant indirect effects indicated that the audience provoked evaluation apprehension which hindered other-race identification accuracy and improved same-race identification accuracy. We suggest that using double-blind lineup procedures may not sufficiently protect eyewitness identification accuracy when making other-race lineup decisions in the presence of others.     

Safety in Numbers: A Policy‐Capturing Study of the Alibi Assessment Process

A policy‐capturing analysis of alibi assessments was conducted. University students (N = 65), law enforcement students (N = 21), and police officers (N = 11) were provided with 32 statements from individuals supporting a suspect's alibi (i.e., alibi corroborators) and asked to assess the believability of the alibi, the suspect's guilt, and whether they would arrest the suspect. Each statement was composed of five binary features (i.e., relationship between corroborator and accused, age of corroborator, amount of available corroborators, alibi corroborator's confidence in their account, and memorability of the target event). Results showed that there was much parity in the type of information used to assess alibis across the samples. Specifically, we found that 90% of participants' decision policies included the amount of corroborators. Participants also relied upon, albeit to a lesser extent, the suspect–corroborator relationship and the age of the corroborator when assessing the alibi. The potential implications of these findings for understanding how people assess alibi corroborators are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Children's scale errors: A by‐product of lexical development?

Scale errors occur when young children seriously attempt to perform an action on an object which is impossible due to its size. Children vary substantially in the incidence of scale errors with many factors potentially contributing to these differences, such as age and the type of scale errors. In particular, the evidence for an inverted U‐shaped curve of scale errors involving the child's body (i.e., body scale errors), which would point to a developmental stage, is mixed. Here we re‐examine how body scale errors vary with age and explore the possibility that these errors would be related to the size and properties of children's lexicon. A large sample of children aged 18–30 months (N = 125) was tested in a scale error elicitation situation. Additionally, parental questionnaires were collected to assess children's receptive and expressive lexicon. Our key findings are that scale errors linearly decrease with age in childhood, and are more likely to be found in early talkers rather than in less advanced ones. This suggests that scale errors do not correspond to a developmental stage, and that one determinant of these errors is the speed of development of the linguistic and conceptual system, as a potential explanation for the individual variability in prevalence.     

The elimination‐plus lineup: Testing a modified lineup procedure with confidence

The present study examined whether a modified form of a preidentification confidence rating would provide evidence of a suspect's guilt in addition to the identification decision confidence. Participants (N  = 241) viewed a videotaped mock crime and were presented with a target‐present or target‐absent simultaneous, sequential, elimination, or elimination‐plus lineup procedure; both elimination procedures required 2 separate judgments from the witness (i.e., relative and absolute). The elimination‐plus procedure was identical to that of the elimination procedure with the addition of the confidence rating in between judgment 1 and judgment 2. Confidence after judgment 1, confidence after judgment 2, and the average of the 2 confidence ratings with the elimination‐plus procedure significantly predicted accuracy for choosers. Given that confidence has been recognised by the Supreme Court of the United States, these results shed light on a novel way of utilising confidence in the investigative process.     

A comparison of video and static photo lineups with child and adolescent witnesses

In the UK video parades are the preferred method of identification employed in criminal cases. This policy implementation has been employed with little or no evidence concerning its validity. The reported research examines the effect of new video technology on children's identification evidence. The study compared 7–9 and 13–15‐year olds' ability to make identifications from either video or static photo lineups. Two hundred and fifteen participants witnessed a live event and then after a delay of 2–3 days viewed a target present (TP), or target absent (TA) video or photo lineup. For video and photo TP lineups, correct responses did not differ as a function of age. Video lineups produced lower rates of false identifications for the TA lineups, but only for adolescent witnesses. It is concluded that there is nothing contra‐indicated in the use of video identification procedures with children, and possibly certain benefits can accrue from its use. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Latent class analysis of college women's motivations for engaging in same-sex performativity

Same-sex performativity (SSP), or public performances of sexuality (e.g., kissing) between women who identify as heterosexual, is a relatively common relational experience among college-aged women. Identifying patterns of women's motivations for engaging in SSP can elucidate the heterogeneity among women's social and sexual behaviors during a critical developmental period (i.e., college). We used latent class analysis to identify classes of heterosexual undergraduate women who engaged in SSP (N = 282). We identified three classes of motivational patterns: Other-Motivated (i.e., notably motivated by male attention, wanting to shock others, wanting to bond, and social pressure), Ambiguously Motivated (i.e., most motivated by alcohol and fun, but minimally motivated overall), and Sexually Motivated (i.e., notably motivated by sexual desire and sexual experimentation). We then examined how class membership was associated with variables related to participants' evaluation of their SSP experience, self and identity, sexuality, and heterosexism. Classes significantly differed in SSP evaluations, as well as in certain facets of self and identity and sexuality (i.e., sorority membership and same-sex desire). These data provide evidence of substantial complexity in the characterizations of women who engage in SSP. We discuss the implications of the relationship between motivational patterns and women's evaluations of the SSP experience.     

Syntactic Creativity Errors in Children's Wh-Questions

Previous work has reported that children creatively make syntactic errors that are ungrammatical in their target language, but are grammatical in another language. One of the most well-known examples is medial wh-question errors in English-speaking children's wh-questions (e.g., What do you think who the cat chased? from Thornton, 1990). The evidence for this non-target-like structure in both production and comprehension has been taken to support the existence of innate, syntactic parameters that define all possible grammatical variation, which serve as a top-down constraint guiding children's language acquisition process. The present study reports new story-based production and comprehension experiments that challenge this interpretation. While we replicated previous observations of medial wh-question errors in children's sentence production (Experiment 1), we saw a reduction in evidence indicating that English-speaking children assign interpretations that conform to the medial wh-question pattern (Experiment 2). Crucially, we found no correlation between production and comprehension errors (Experiment 3). We suggest that these errors are the result of children's immature sentence production mechanisms rather than immature grammatical knowledge.     

Non‐blind lineup administration biases administrators' interpretations of ambiguous witness statements and their perceptions of the witness

Administering lineups “blind”—whereby the administrator does not know the identity of the suspect—is considered part of best practices for lineups. The current study tests whether non‐blind lineup administrators would evaluate ambiguous eyewitness statements, and the witness himself or herself, in a manner consistent with their beliefs. College students (n = 219) were told the identity of the suspect or not before administering a lineup to a confederate‐witness who made an ambiguous response (e.g., “it could be #3 but I'm not sure”). When ambiguous witness statements matched administrators' beliefs regarding the suspect (compared with when they mismatched administrators' beliefs, or administrators had no belief), administrators (a) were significantly more likely to record the statement as an identification (as opposed to a “not sure” response); (b) were significantly less likely to make statements that might lead the witness away from the suspect; and (c) evaluated the witness's viewing conditions significantly more positively.     

The influence of linguistic labels on source‐monitoring decisions

Three studies explored the extent to which people use various object features, including linguistic label, shape, and category membership, to make decisions about the source of their memories. To isolate the influence of each feature, we used items that were related in the following four ways: as synonyms, as similar in shape and category membership, as homographs, or as unrelated. Participants read sentences and either saw or imagined a picture of the critical word's referent. Experiment 1 showed that participants committed more source errors for synonyms (e.g., rabbit and bunny) than for objects that were conceptually and perceptually similar (e.g., doughnut and bagel), which produced more errors than unrelated items. However, there was no effect of label, as people did not have more errors for homographs (e.g., baseball bat and flying bat) than unrelated items. In Experiment 2, presenting the critical word at study was not sufficient to lead people to use an item's label to make source decisions. However, Experiment 3 showed more source errors for homographs than unrelated pairs when semantic context was minimised at study, suggesting that people can use linguistic labels to make source decisions when other information is unavailable.     

When Mental States Matter,When They Don't,and What That Means for Morality

Research has shown that moral judgments depend on the capacity to engage in mental state reasoning. In this article, we will first review behavioral and neural evidence for the role of mental states (e.g., people's beliefs, desires, intentions) in judgments of right and wrong. Second, we will consider cases where mental states appear at first to matter less (i.e., when people assign moral blame for accidents and when explicit information about mental states is missing). Third, we will consider cases where mental states, in fact, matter less, specifically, in cases of “purity” violations (e.g., committing incest, consuming taboo foods). We will discuss how and why mental states do not matter equivalently across the multi‐dimensional space of morality. In the fourth section of this article, we will elaborate on the possibility that norms against harmful actions and norms against “impure” actions serve distinct functions – for regulating interpersonal interactions (i.e., harm) versus for protecting the self (i.e., purity). In the fifth and final section, we will speculate on possible differences in how we represent and reason about other people's mental states versus our own beliefs and intentions. In addressing these issues, we aim to provide insight into the complex structure and distinct functions of mental state reasoning and moral cognition. We conclude that mental state reasoning allows us to make sense of other moral agents in order to understand their past actions, to predict their future behavior, and to evaluate them as potential friends or foes.     

How the Defendant's Emotion Level Affects Mock Jurors' Decisions When Presentation Mode and Evidence Strength Are Varied1

Two experiments (N= 443) were conducted to investigate the effects of a defendant's emotion level during testimony on mock jurors' decisions. In Experiment 1, the defendant's level of emotion (low, moderate, high) and mode of presentation (audio, video) were varied. The defendant displaying a low level, as opposed to a higher level of emotion was perceived as more guilty and less credible. In Experiment 2, using only the video mode, emotion level and evidence strength (strong, weak) were varied. Defendant emotion level tended to affect jurors' decisions only when the evidence against the defendant was weak (i.e., a stronger display of emotion was associated with a lower proportion of guilty verdicts, shorter sentence assignments, and perceptions of a more honest defendant). Path analyses for both experiments indicate that the effects of emotion on perceived guilt level are mediated by perceptions of the defendant (e.g., the defendant's level of honesty). Implications of using defendant emotion level for determining guilt are discussed.     

Learning what from where: Effects of spatial regularity on nonspatial sequence learning and updating

The current study examined the influence of redundant stimulus features on our ability to build and update representations of our environment. We hypothesized that our ability to process redundant spatial features would speed our ability to adapt to changing nonspatial regularities. Using a computerized version of the children's game “rock–paper–scissors”, undergraduates were instructed to win as often as possible against a computer opponent. The computer's plays were repeating sequences of five choices that were presented either with spatial regularity (i.e., “rock” would always appear on the left, “paper” in the middle, and “scissors” on the right) or without spatial regularity (i.e., the items were equally likely to appear in any of the three locations). Once participants learned a sequence, the computer switched to a different sequence without participants being informed that a switch had occurred. Redundant spatial regularity improved a participant's ability both to learn sequences of plays and to update their plays to reflect new computer sequences. Our results suggest that our perceptual system is sensitive to redundant spatial stimulus features and that this information can improve learning and updating.     

The wildcard: A simple technique for improving children's target‐absent lineup performance

We attempted to increase children's willingness to reject target‐absent lineups by making identification and rejection response procedures highly comparable. Eight‐ to eleven‐year‐old children (N = 159) were briefly exposed to a confederate in the context of a staged event, and 24–48 hours later completed either a target‐present or target‐absent photographic lineup task. Within each lineup condition, children were either told to tell the experimenter if the target was not present (control condition), or provided with an additional photograph of a silhouetted figure with a large question mark superimposed (wildcard condition), and asked to point to this photograph if the target was not present. The wildcard increased children's accuracy on the target‐absent lineup without affecting their target‐present performance. In fact, performance was increased to a point at which target‐absent and target‐present accuracy did not differ significantly. These findings offer a promising, easily‐implemented intervention for reducing children's eyewitness identification errors. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

I See Not Only a Madonna,but Also a Hole,in the Picture

According to an intuitive claim, in saying that one sees a picture's subject, i.e., what a picture presents, in the picture's vehicle, i.e., the picture's physical basis, by ‘in’ one does not mean the spatial relation of being in, as holding between such items in the real space. For the picture's subject is knowingly not in the real space where one veridically sees the picture's vehicle. Some theories of pictorial experience have actually agreed with this intuition by claiming that the picture's subject lies in a pictorial space of its own, disconnected from the real space that includes the picture's vehicle. Yet, not only linguistic evidence suggests that when used as above, ‘in’ means precisely that very relation, but an appropriate theory of pictorial experience can justify the above claim.     

Cohen's d Corrected for Case IV Range Restriction: A More Accurate Procedure for Evaluating Subgroup Differences in Organizational Research

Organizational and staffing researchers are often interested in evaluating whether subgroup differences exist (e.g., between Caucasian and African‐American individuals) on predictors of job performance. To investigate subgroup differences, researchers often will collect data from current employees to make inferences about subgroup differences among job applicants. However, the magnitude of subgroup differences (i.e., Cohen's d) within incumbent samples may be different (i.e., smaller) than the magnitude of subgroup differences in applicant samples because selection of applicants typically reduces the variance of scores on the predictors (i.e., because lower scoring applicants are not selected). If researchers seek to generalize a d value in an incumbent sample to the applicant population, they may use Bobko, Roth, and Bobko's (correcting the effect size of d for range restriction and unreliability, 2001) Case II or III correction. By extension, Hunter, Schmidt, and Le (implications of direct and indirect range restriction for meta‐analysis methods and findings, 2006) have proposed a Case IV correction, which is more realistic than Bobko et al.'s approach. Therefore, this paper develops a Case IV correction for d (i.e., d_c4). The simulation results showed that the d_c4 was generally accurate across 6,000 simulation conditions. Moreover, 2 published datasets were reanalyzed to show the influence of the Case IV correction on d. In addition, implications and future directions of the d_c4 are discussed.     

Power and Gender Influences on Responsibility Attributions: The Case of Disagreements in Relationships

Abstract

In a sample of 156 college students (74 men and 82 women), the authors examined the influences of power status and gender on responsibility attributions and resolution choices during disagreements in personal relationships. The participants read vignettes in which relationship partners disagreed; then the participants placed themselves in the situations depicted and reported their perceived responsibility and resolution choices. The participants were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 power-status conditions (you have/your partner has greater power in the situation). Power status was based on resource power (i.e., a monetary inheritance) or on perceived power (i.e., financial knowledge). The authors tested 2 alternative power-status hypotheses (justified benefits/rights and ability/accountability) and 1 gender hypothesis. The results supported both power-status hypotheses. In addition, the men's and the women's responsibility attributions and resolution choices (i.e., adhering to their own wishes or deferring to their partner's wishes) revealed differential dependence on the type of power held by the person with greater situational power. The authors suggest issues further research concerning how situational differences in socially based expectations (e.g., power status and gender) may affect conflicts within relationships.