Collective interviewing of suspects

When people are interviewed about possible wrongdoing that has been committed in groups, they typically are interviewed separately. Yet, in several settings it would be more intuitive and convenient to interview suspects together. Importantly, such collective interviews could yield verbal cues to deception. This is the first deception experiment to investigate collective interviewing. Twenty-one pairs of truth tellers and 22 pairs of liars were interviewed pair-wise about having had lunch together in a restaurant. Given that truth tellers adopt a “tell it all” strategy in the interviews while, in contrast, liars prefer to keep their stories simple, we predicted that pairs of truth tellers would (i) interrupt and (ii) correct each other more, and would (iii) add more information to each other's answers than pairs of liars. The results supported these hypotheses. Theory-driven interventions to elicit more cues to deception through simultaneous interviewing are discussed.     

Public Science of the Savage Mind: Contesting Cultural Anthropology in the Cold War Classroom

“What is human about human beings? How did they get that way? How can they be made more so?” These three questions formed the basis of a fifth‐grade social studies curriculum project developed in the 1960s called Man: A Course of Study, or MACOS. In the years between the curriculum's development in the 1960s and its controversial implementation in the 1970s, two separate sets of concerns served to problematize the use of anthropological materials in public school classrooms. On the one hand, MACOS designers were wary of the possibly racist interpretations of exploring so‐called “primitive” cultures in the classroom. On the other, conservative textbook reformers objected to claims that all cultural solutions to biological problems were morally equivalent. Once MACOS earned a place in national news, it came to embody both hopes for the redemption of American democratic society and fears about the violent nature of humans, depending on one's political perspective. These mixed messages eventually undermined the long‐term success of the program as public science.     

Investigating semantic memory impairments: The contribution of semantic priming

Abstract

The semantic priming task is a valuable tool in the investigation of semantic memory impairments in patients with acquired disorders of language. This is because priming performance reflects automatic or implicit access to semantic information, unlike most other tests of semantic knowledge, which rely on explicit, voluntary access. Priming results are important for two main reasons: First, normal priming results may be observed in patients who perform poorly on other semantic memory tests, enabling us to distinguish between loss of, or damage to, information in semantic memory, and voluntary access to that information. Second, we can investigate the detailed pattern of loss and preservation of different types of semantic information, by charting the priming effects for different kinds of words, and different kinds of semantic relations between primes and targets.

We discuss the use of the priming task in this context, and address some of the theoretical and methodological criticisms that have been raised in connection with use of the priming task to address these issues. We then describe two recent studies in which we have employed semantic priming tasks, along with other more traditional methods, to investigate specific questions about the semantic memory deficits of three patients.     

Veracity is in the eye of the beholder: A lens model examination of consistency and deception

Research has attempted to explain perceived cues to deception based upon self-report of what participants believe are ‘good’ cues to deception, or self-report of what cues participants say they base their veracity judgements on. However, it is not clear to what extent participants can accurately self-report what influences their decision-making. Using a within-subjects design, 285 participants completed a questionnaire regarding their beliefs about deception before rating a selection of truthful and deceptive statements on a variety of cues. Expert coders also rated the statements for the same cues. Laypeople and expert coders do not conceptualise between-subject consistency in the same way. A lens model showed that whilst perceptions of cues, such as consistency and amount of detail, influence veracity judgements, these perceptions (and overall veracity judgements) are mostly inaccurate. Fundamentally, there seems to be inconsistencies between how deception research examines consistency and how it is understood and used by laypeople.     

Emotional vulnerability and coping styles for resolving decisional conflict

This investigation supplements the study by D. Bouckenooghe, K. Vanderheyden, S. Mestdagh, and S. van Laethem (2007) on the role of cognitive dispositions in coping patterns for resolving decisional conflict. Literature suggests emotional vulnerabilities may significantly affect decision making. Thus, the present authors assessed the role of trait anxiety and depression in decision coping styles as specified by I. L. Janis and L. Mann's (1977) conflict-theory model. The participants--100 young adults--completed the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale (J. A. Taylor, 1953), Beck's Depression Inventory (A. T. Beck, R. A. Steer, & G. M. Garbin, 1988), and the Melbourne Decision-Making Questionnaire (L. Mann et al., 1998), which measures 4 coping strategies: vigilance, buck-passing, procrastination, and hypervigilance. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis, controlling for demographic and lifestyle factors, revealed trait anxiety and depression as significant predictors of procrastination and hypervigilance. Depression failed to predict buck-passing but functioned as an important moderator variable whereby trait anxiety better predicted hypervigilance in nondepressed participants. Consistent with past research, emotional dispositions failed to predict vigilance. Overall, these findings implicate emotional vulnerabilities in the quality of decision making but raise important questions about their unique and conditional effects.     

Growing Up in Violent Communities: Do Family Conflict and Gender Moderate Impacts on Adolescents’ Psychosocial Development?

This study examined the moderating effects of family conflict and gender on the relationship between community violence and psychosocial development at age 18. The study sample consisted of 728 children and families who were part of the Infant Health and Development Program study of low-birth-weight, pre-term infants. In this sample, adolescent psychosocial outcomes were predicted by community violence differently for male and female children and based on their experiences of conflict at home. For male children, being in a high conflict family as a child exacerbated the negative effects of community violence such that internalizing problems (depression and anxiety) and risk-taking behaviors increased as community violence increased, while being in a low conflict family protected the child against the negative impacts of the community. For female adolescents, there were no moderating effects of family conflict on the relationship between community violence and externalizing problems. Moderating effects for internalizing problems demonstrated that being in low conflict families did not serve as protection against community violence for girls as was demonstrated for boys. These findings demonstrate the long-term effects of community violence on child development, highlighting the importance of gender and family context in the development of internalizing and externalizing problems.     

Key questions to consider in stalking cases

Stalkers can inflict severe injury upon and have been known to kill their victims. Based on the detailed responses of 1,565 stalking victims, a set of key questions was produced with the aim of increasing the opportunities of police officers to identify potentially dangerous stalkers. Despite marked methodological differences and the inclusion of a large number of variables, regression analyses for significant correlates for physical assault per se and for severe violence largely reflected the results of earlier works. For severe violence (n=136), the most important correlate was a high level of victim fear, suggesting that victims are adept at assessing their own risk of stalker violence. The set of 11 questions performed well on preliminary tests and is presented here.