Silent talker: a new computer‐based system for the analysis of facial cues to deception

This paper presents the development of a computerised, non‐invasive psychological profiling system, ‘Silent Talker’, for the analysis of non‐verbal behaviour. Nonverbal signals hold rich information about mental, behavioural and/or physical states. Previous attempts to extract individual signals and to classify an overall behaviour have been time‐consuming, costly, biased, error‐prone and complex. Silent Talker overcomes these problems by the use of Artificial Neural Networks. The testing and validation of the system was undertaken by detecting processes associated with ‘deception’ and ‘truth’. In a simulated theft scenario thirty‐nine participants ‘stole’ (or didn't) money, and were interviewed about its location. Silent Talker was able to detect different behaviour patterns indicative of ‘deception’ and ‘truth’ significantly above chance. For example, when 15 European men had no prior knowledge of the exact questions, 74% of individual responses ( p < 0.001) and 80% ( p = 0.035) of interviews were classified correctly. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

No decision‐maker is an Island: integrating expert advice with information acquisition

The present research examined the social context of information acquisition. The main purpose was to examine how decision‐makers' information acquisition processes changed when they were provided access to expert advice. Results indicated that all decision‐makers opted to acquire advice; however, they typically did so only after completing over 75% of their own information search. Decision‐makers agreed more with the advice as task complexity increased, but, in general, searched information in two stages—i.e., a pre‐advice “hypothesis generation” stage and a post‐advice “hypothesis testing” stage. To behave in an adaptive manner, decision‐makers could have used expert advice either to increase their decision accuracy or to reduce their effort expenditure (or both); they chose the former. Implications and further extensions are discussed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Calculating savings to the nation from counselling services: Methodological challenges

The research endeavoured to develop and pilot a system to demonstrate savings to the nation resulting from counselling provided by a national voluntary agency. This paper demonstrates the methodological challenges encountered. A questionnaire was developed, focused on four broad dimensions of clients’ lives: Employment & Income, Health, Personal & Social, and Children. The questionnaire was piloted by eight counselling centres, and applied pre‐ and post‐intervention. It proved not always possible to attribute clear savings within the dimensions measured. Direct health‐related costs and sick days off work were relatively straightforward. However, for less tangible factors, e.g. personal and social, and children, it was not possible to attribute direct financial amounts to any improvements. The pilot, therefore, attributed savings where possible. Attrition was a major difficulty, with 976 pre‐intervention questionnaires reducing to only 159 post‐intervention. This paper indicates the challenges of estimating savings to the nation from counselling interventions, and illustrates a flexible flowchart which allows savings and costs to be attributed as and when available. Although no final calculations of savings to the nation are included, it is believed that the learning from the methodological challenges encountered should be useful to other services wishing to assess the financial costs and savings of psychological therapies and counselling.     

An Examination of Young Adolescents' Knowledge of and Attitude Toward Sexuality According to Perceived Contraceptive Responsibility1

A total of 442 ninth-grade, black, inner city adolescents participated in a survey of their knowledge of human reproduction, level of self-esteem, and attitudes toward birth control and sexual intercourse. Ninety-two percent of the females and 33% of the males responded that they or they and their partner were responsible for using birth control. The 148 males perceiving contraceptive responsibility as belonging to their partner or no one were most accepting of sexual intercourse and agreed that teenage parenthood is an index of adulthood. Girls were nearly unanimous in their low level of acceptance of sexual intercourse. Annual birth statistics from their high school indicate, however, that a minimum of 13% of these ninth-grade girls will become pregnant in the ensuing academic year. The apparent contradictions of young adolescents' knowledge of and attitudes toward sexuality are discussed in the context of developmental theory.     

Issue Salience, Perceived Efficacy and Perceived Risk: A Study of the Origins of Anti-Nuclear War Activity

One hundred eleven college students participated in this two-session experiment designed to explore the origins of anti-nuclear war activism. In Session 1 participants completed questionnaires assessing a number of background characteristics and attitudes, the most important of which for this study's purpose was a measure of perceived political efficacy in the nuclear realm. One week later both the salience of the nuclear weapons issue and participants' sense of personalized risk were experimentally manipulated in a 2 × 2 × 2 (salience × risk × measured efficacy) design. Dependent measures were a behavioral intentions questionnaire and an actual opportunity to sign a petition which participants did not recognize as part of the experiment. High salience significantly increased both anti-nuclear war behavioral intentions and actual behavior as predicted. Individuals who felt highly efficacious were also significantly more likely to take action than others as predicted. A similar relation between efficacy and behavioral intentions was not found, although a salience by efficacy interaction was. Personalized risk influenced only behavioral intentions. Finally, the relative impact of these three variables and of other background and attitudinal variables measured in the first session was explored using regression techniques.     

The role of structure in coreference assignment during sentence comprehension

This paper examines the role of symtactic constraints on the reactivation and assignment of antecedents to explicit and implicit anaphoric elements during sentence comprehension. Evidence from on-line studies examining the time course of coreference processing supports the view that reactivation of potential antecedents is restricted by grammatical constraints when they are available. When structural information cannot serve to constrain antecedent selection, then pragmatic information may play a role, but only at a later point in processing.     

Why we are fairer than others

Subjects wrote lists of either fair or unfair things that they or others did. A pervasive tendency was found for subjects to associate themselves with fair behaviors and others with unfair behaviors. When different subjects rated samples of the written behaviors for fairness and frequency we found that fair behaviors were rated as more frequent than unfair behaviors and self-ascribed behaviors were rated as fairer than behaviors ascribed to others. These findings and others are shown to result from a tendency for subjects to perceive a stronger link between the fairness and frequency of their own behavior than between the fairness and frequency of the behavior of other people. A final analysis showed that the subcategories of unfair behavior that subjects associated with others were different from those associated with themselves.     

Ordering and reordering in the auditory and visual modalities

This study investigates the hypothesis that the modality effect (i.e., the often-found recall advantage of the last few items presented in the auditory- rather than visual-input modality) is attributable to a directional auditory trace. Such a directional trace should help performance of forward item-to-item recall, but should hurt performance if mental reordering is required. However, it was found in our Experiment 1 that mental item-to-item reordering of the materials did not affect the modality effect. In Experiment 2, strict control was exercised over the order of recall of chunks of items, as well as over the order of recall within chunks. It was found that the item-to-item reordering of the materials had little effect on the modality effect. However, the larger scale order of recall of the chunks had a large effect on the modality effect. If recall was in a forward order (i.e., first chunk, second chunk, third chunk), there was a dramatic superiority of the auditory materials on the last chunk. If the recall order was backward (third chunk, second chunk, first chunk), the modality effect was inconsequential. These results suggest that the modality effect is related to access to large memorial units rather than to item-to-item associations.     

Conceptual level matching in therapy: A review

It is a common observation that certain kinds of patient-therapy (therapist) pairings are more beneficial than others. Attempts to find out why, through interactional research on therapy, have proven to be difficult. It is often suggested that one reason for this is the absence of an adequate theoretical framework within which such research can be conducted. However, in recent years, one theory, conceptual systems theory (CST), a cognitive personality theory, has developed to the stage where it appears to offer some promise in this regard. This article offers an evaluative review of the empirical studies, with relevance to therapy, which use CST as a basis for interactional research; an analysis of the conceptual and methodological problems inherent in its use; and a discussion of the implication of findings for therapeutic practice. Figures 1 and 2 originally appeared in Short, Edmund C., “Knowledge Production and Utilization in Curriculum: A Special Case of the General Phenomenon.”Review of Educational Research, Summer 1979, pp. 237-301. Copyright 1979, American Educational Research Association, Washington, D.C. Reproduced with permission.