Obtaining guilty knowledge in human intelligence interrogations: Comparing accusatorial and information-gathering approaches with a novel experimental paradigm

Substantial research has assessed interrogations seeking to obtain a criminal confession, and consequently much has been learned regarding the potential problems with confession evidence. However, an increasing focus on counter-terrorism, and therefore intelligence interrogations, reveals an obvious gap in the literature. Intelligence interrogations are primarily focused on collecting information from individuals as opposed to a confession linked to an alleged event, and little of the extant psychological literature can speak directly to such a scenario. The current research developed an experimental paradigm to test interrogation approaches in an intelligence-gathering context, providing a method for gathering empirical data on human intelligence collection. In the first implementation of this paradigm, accusatorial and information-gathering interrogation strategies were tested using a procedure high in psychological realism. Results indicate that an information-gathering approach yields more relevant information than an accusatorial approach and leads to more diagnostic impressions by third party observers.     

Personality Dysfunction and the Management of Chronic Medical Illness: A Community Health Sample

The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of personality disorders on perceived health status, self-efficacy for management of the chronic illness, and physician perception of patient health. A total of 607 patients with self-identified chronicillness(es) volunteered to participate in the study. Out of this sample, 147 had collaborative physician data indicating a chronic illness. The final sample was 143 due to incomplete data. Results suggested that maladaptive personality characteristics, as measured by the Short-Form of the Coolidge Axis II Inventory (SCATI), were related to a number of important factors that influence self-management of chronic illnesses. When the personality constellations were broken into 3 groups (normal, subclinical, and clinical) significant differences were found on the 3 groups of dependent variables (Subjective Health, Self-Efficacy, Physician Appraisal) for the different personality disorders. These data provide useful information on several factors that influence effective disease management. Clinical implications and directions for future research are provided.     

Inequity/Iniquity: Card on Balancing Injustice and Evil

Card argues that we should not give injustice priority over evil. I agree. But I think Card sets us up for some difficult balances, for example of small evils against middle‐sized injustices. I suggest some ways of staying off the tightrope.     

The impact of novel labels on visual processing during infancy

The impact of novel labels on visual processing was investigated across two experiments with infants aged between 9 and 21 months. Infants viewed pairs of images across a series of preferential looking trials. On each trial, one image was novel, and the other image had previously been viewed by the infant. Some infants viewed images in silence; other infants viewed images accompanied by novel labels. The pattern of fixations both across and within trials revealed that infants in the labelling condition took longer to develop a novelty preference than infants in the silent condition. Our findings contrast with prior research by Robinson and Sloutsky (e.g., Robinson & Sloutsky, 2007a ; Sloutsky & Robinson, 2008 ) who found that novel labels did not disrupt visual processing for infants aged over a year. Provided that overall task demands are sufficiently high, it appears that labels can disrupt visual processing for infants during the developmental period of establishing a lexicon. The results suggest that when infants are processing labels and objects, attentional resources are shared across modalities.     

When to Self-Correct?: A Comparison of Two Procedures on Spelling Performance

We compared the effects of two self-correction procedures on the spelling performance of 5 elementary school students with learning disabilities. Previous studies consistently have demonstrated self-correction to be more effective than traditional approaches to spelling instruction. However, we could find no single-subject design experiments analyzing the procedural details of how or when self-correction should be conducted to be most effective. For 4 days each week students practiced a list of 20 spelling words by listening to an audiotape on which the weekly list was dictated and writing the words. For half of each week's words, students checked and self-corrected after attempting each word; for the other half of the list, the students self-corrected after attempting all 10 words. An alternating treatments design showed self-correction after each word to be more effective for acquisition of new spelling words as measured by end-of-the-week tests for all 5 students, and maintenance of previously studied spelling words as measured by 1-week maintenance tests for 4 of the 5 students.     

Acoustic confusion of digits in memory and recognition

It has been shown that, contrary to current opinion, digits do not confuse arbitrarily and that similar patterns of confusion are observed in memory and auditory recognition tasks. Two alternative measures of stimulus similarity are compared.