Male and female managers' ability to read emotions: Relationships with supervisor's performance ratings and subordinates' satisfaction ratings

The present study examines the direct and indirect effect of managers' accuracy in ‘reading’ non‐verbal emotional expressions and their supervisors' performance ratings and subordinates' satisfaction with the manager. Data from working managers and their supervisors and subordinates were used to test the study's hypotheses. Although managers' accuracy was not directly related to others' ratings, a significant interactive effect was found: Female but not male managers who more accurately perceived non‐verbal emotional expressions received higher performance ratings from their supervisor and higher satisfaction ratings from their subordinates, perhaps due to gender stereotypes prescribing emotional sensitivity to female managers. Furthermore, how managers used emotional information to enhance subordinates' satisfaction varied for female and male managers. Results suggested that male managers who were more accurate at emotion perception received higher satisfaction ratings if they used the information to be more persuasive, whereas more emotionally perceptive female managers received higher satisfaction ratings when they demonstrated more supportiveness.     

Skilled Observation and Change Blindness: A Comparison of Law Enforcement and Student Samples

Some evidence suggests that expertise and observational skills training can reduce attentional errors, such as change blindness. Laypeople typically assume that law enforcement officers possess acute observational skills, but no research to date has compared law enforcement and lay samples on their susceptibility to change blindness. In the present study, student and law enforcement samples completed a change blindness task and attempted to identify the target(s) from four line‐ups. Law enforcement officers and students were equally susceptible to change blindness regarding the switch in the target's identity, but students were more likely than officers to detect changes in the target's clothing. Students also performed better on the line‐up task, overall, than officers. Additionally, whereas students' confidence was positively correlated with identification accuracy under some circumstances, officers' confidence was either uncorrelated or negatively correlated with accuracy. We discuss the implications of these findings and suggest some factors accounting for law enforcement officers' relatively poor performance on these tasks. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Earwitness identification performance: the effect of language,target, deliberate strategies and indirect measures

The present study examined whether voice identification performance is influenced by language comprehension (i.e. familiar vs. non‐familiar language) and target presence (target‐present (TP) vs. target‐absent line‐ups (TA)). It also looked at the relationship of deliberate strategies and indirect measures (i.e. confidence, difficulty and pressure) with performance. Sixty Native English speakers were exposed to an auditory event involving 45 to 50 seconds of speech. After 30 minutes delay, participants listened to a voice line‐up (TP or TA) in either a familiar (i.e. English) or unfamiliar language (i.e. French) according to the language spoken during the event, and were then asked to identify the original speaker's voice. Participants demonstrated significantly better performance for the familiar language/TP line‐ups. Participants who reported using the ‘elimination’ strategy were significantly more accurate than participants who reported using either a ‘matching’ strategy or no strategy. Indirect measures were not found to be good predictors of performance, except for confidence regarding TA accuracy. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effects of post ‐identification feedback and age on retrospective eyewitness memory

Two studies examined the effects of post‐identification feedback, age, and retention interval on participants' memories and beliefs about memories for a videotaped event, as captured by a store surveillance camera. After viewing the video, they were then asked to identify the suspect from a target‐absent photo line‐up. After making their identification, some participants were given information suggesting that their identification was correct, while others were given no information about the accuracy of their identification. In both experiments participants who received confirming feedback indicated they were more confident in their identification, paid more attention to the video, and that they were more willing to testify in court than those who received no feedback. The confidence inflation effects of post‐identification feedback did not vary with retention interval or age. These results are consistent with a position focusing on accessibility, which suggests that witnesses have little or no retrievable recollection of how sure they were at the time of their identification. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Confidence and Eyewitness Identifications: The Cross‐Race Effect,Decision Time and Accuracy

Participants encountered same‐race and cross‐race faces at encoding, completed a series of line‐up identification tests and provided confidence ratings by using one of nine different confidence scales. Confidence was less well calibrated with identification accuracy when participants selected a cross‐race than a same‐race face because of overconfidence. By contrast, there was no cross‐race effect on confidence–accuracy calibration when participants responded ‘not present’. Whereas confidence was a very strong predictor of accuracy for fast identifications of a line‐up face, this was much less the case for slower decisions. Highly confident identifications showed a dramatic drop in accuracy from faster decisions to slower decisions, whereas there was little change in accuracy between faster and slower decisions for moderately confident or weakly confident identifications. Finally, we observed little influence of the format of the nine different confidence scales: numerical and verbal scales produced comparable calibration scores, as did scales with few or many points. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Overconfidence at the Keyboard: Confidence and Accuracy in Interpreting Affect in E‐Mail Exchanges

Gesture, voice, expression, and context add richness to communications that increase chances of accurate interpretation. E‐mails lack much of this richness, leading readers to impose their own richness. Three experiments tested the effect of communicator relationship and availability of context on e‐mail writer and reader confidence levels and accuracy. Effects of nonverbal and verbal behavior were also investigated. Results showed that confidence levels for both writers and readers were high, yet somewhat unwarranted based on accuracy rates. Further, writers had more confidence that friends would correctly interpret e‐mails than strangers, although friends showed no more accuracy. Findings suggest that reliance upon friendship and context, as well as verbal and nonverbal cues, to interpret emotion in e‐mail is ineffective, sometimes detrimental.     

Postidentification feedback effects on face recognition confidence: evidence for metacognitive influences

Information given to witnesses after an identification decision greatly alters their impressions of the original event and importantly, their identification confidence. Two experiments investigated the possibility that the effect of feedback on confidence may be altered according to the strength of the witness's cues to accuracy. Experiment 1 used a manipulation of exposure duration to alter recognition accuracy prior to the delivery of confirming, disconfirming or no feedback. While the feedback effect was not different across exposure duration conditions, decisions that were made more quickly were less likely to show large changes in confidence due to feedback. Experiment 2 manipulated the distinctiveness of faces and showed that the effects of feedback on confidence, and on the resolution of the confidence judgement, were more pronounced when disconfirming feedback was given for distinctive faces and when confirming feedback was given for typical faces. These studies showed that the impressions that participants formed of their likely accuracy might moderate the effects of feedback on decision confidence. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Exposure duration: Effects on eyewitness accuracy and confidence

The current study examined the relationship between the length of exposure to a face in an eyewitness setting and identification accuracy and confidence. A sample of 164 young (ages 17–25) and older (ages 59–81) adults viewed a simulated crime in which they saw the culprit's face for a short (12 s) or long (45 s) duration. They were then tested with a target absent (a line‐up not containing the culprit) or target present line‐up. Identification accuracy rates for both young and older participants were significantly higher under the long exposure condition. In the short exposure condition, witnesses who had made a correct identification of the target were more confident than incorrect witnesses. In the long exposure condition the confidence ratings of accurate and inaccurate witnesses did not differ. Discussion focuses on the extent to which extended exposure may inflate confidence judgments and variables that may moderate the relationship between exposure duration and face recognition accuracy.     

“I think you did it!”: Examining the effect of presuming guilt on the verbal output of innocent suspects during brief interviews

Innocent suspects interviewed by a guilt‐presumptive versus innocence‐presumptive or neutral interviewer may tend more to display non‐verbal behaviours which neutral judges consider indicative of guilt. We examined the effects of interviewer's presumption of guilt on innocent mock suspects' alibis. Participants (N = 90) provided an alibi to convince an interviewer of their innocence of a theft after she implied that she believed that they were guilty or innocent or that she had no belief about their veracity. On the basis of existing conflicting findings for suspects' verbal behaviour during accusatory interviews, we predicted that alibis in the guilt‐belief condition would contain the highest or lowest number of correct details with overall higher or poorer accuracy rates, respectively. Although participants perceived the interviewer's presumptive approach, the number of correct details provided and accuracy rates of alibis did not differ significantly between conditions. We propose explanations to these findings and future research paths.     

Eyewitness memory and aging: predictors of accuracy in recall and person recognition.

This study examined adult age differences in identification accuracy, confidence, and verbal recall of crime films. A total of 120 Ss in 3 adult age groups watched 2 crime films that contained characters varying in role and visibility. Results suggested a modest negative relationship between age and identification accuracy but no age differences in recall of main points or details. Education and self-reported health positively predicted verbal recall, but higher education was associated with lower identification accuracy. No age differences were found in confidence or in the relationship between confidence and accuracy.     

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.