Does a Judicial Warning Improve Defendant‐Culprit Matching?

During a trial, jurors may be asked to compare the defendant with video of the culprit. Yet matching unfamiliar people in this manner can be difficult and error‐prone. Judges may warn jurors about the dangers of identification from video images, but the effect of warnings is unknown. Here we report two studies that assessed the effect of warning instructions on defendant‐culprit matching. In Experiment 1, college students read either control, warning, or illustrated warning instructions before deciding if a defendant seen in one video matched the culprit in another video. Experiment 2 compared control and warning instructions in a sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Matching accuracy in both experiments was poor, and warnings did not consistently improve performance or make participants more cautious. These results do not support the supposition that warning instructions help jurors compare the defendant to images of the culprit.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“If It Helps,I’ll Carry On”: Factors Supporting the Participation of Native and Immigrant Youth in Belgium and Germany

In this article we propose looking into some factors for Civic Participation and the intention to continue to participate among local (Study I) and immigrant (Study II) young people living in Belgium and Germany. In Study I, 1,079 young people (M_age = 19.23, 44.9% males) completed a self-report questionnaire asking about their Civic Participation. Multiple linear regressions reveal (a) evidence of a pool of variables significantly linked to Civic Participation: Institutional Trust, Collective-Efficacy, Parents’ and Peers’ Support, Political Interest, Motivations and (b) that Civic Participation, along with the mediation of the Participation's Efficacy, explains the Intention to Continue to Participate. An explanatory model was constructed on participation and the Intention to Continue to Participate on behalf of the native youth. This model is invariant between the two countries. In Study II, 276 young Turkish immigrants (M_age = 20.80, 49.3% males) recruited in Belgium and Germany filled out the same questionnaire as in Study I. The same analysis was conducted as for Study I, and they provided the same results as the native group, highlighting the invariance of the model between natives and immigrants. Applicative repercussions are discussed.     

How do i know what i feel? Evidence for the role of self‐categorisation in symptom perceptions

This paper extends the self‐categorisation model of symptom appraisals to predict that individuals who believe they have a given illness will perceive concurrent symptoms relevant to that illness to be more severe when they categorise themselves as members of a group of people with that illness. These predictions are supported with opportunity samples of individuals reporting, or not reporting a common cold (Study 1, N = 60) and reporting colds or tinnitus (Study 2, N = 64). In both studies, relevant symptoms were rated as more severe when illness group memberships were salient. The methodological, theoretical and clinical implications of these findings and possible therapeutic applications of self‐categorisation theory (SCT) to symptom perceptions are discussed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.