Lay people's and police officers' attitudes towards the usefulness of perpetrator voice identification

Expert and lay knowledge of factors that affect the identification of a voice is an area of research that is still relatively unexplored. Much more research has focused on eyewitness identification and eyewitnesses' common knowledge. However, results from ‘eyewitnessing’ studies may not be directly applicable to ‘earwitnessing’. The present study examines how knowledgeable British lay people and police officers were concerning earwitness identification performance. One hundred nine participants (i.e. 49 lay people and 60 police officers) responded to a specially designed questionnaire. Results showed respondents to be more knowledgeable than expected, although police officers were no more knowledgeable than the general population. The existence of meta‐knowledge is discussed in relation to previous studies. Copyright © 2006 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.     

Causal attribution for interfirm contract violation: a comparative study of Chinese and American commercial arbitrators

In this study, the authors examined differences between Chinese and American commercial arbitrators. They predicted and found that Chinese arbitrators make higher awards for interfirm contract violations than Americans. This difference is partially explained by differences in attributions. Prior theory suggests, and the authors found, that the Chinese tend to have more internal attributions for events when observing group actions. When evidence provided to arbitrators is mixed (evidence is provided for both internal and external attributions), Chinese-American differences in awards become even stronger.     

Understanding cognitive failures: what's dissociation got to do with it?

Intuitively, cognitive failures and dissociation seem to encompass overlapping mental phenomena. This study used a large sample to examine the nature of the relationship between these constructs. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analyses were performed on the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ). The single factor resulting from the EFA of the CFQ correlated significantly with all factors from the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES). A conjoint item-level factor analysis using all items from both measures was performed, and two factors resulted. The first included all items from the CFQ and appeared to describe an absorption-like phenomenon. The second factor's highest positively loading items assessed more pathological forms of dissociation. Based on our results, we conclude that the CFQ and DES are assessing similar cognitive processes and that cognitive failures, as measured by the CFQ, overlap with nonpathological dissociation.     

Financial Debt and Suicide in Hong Kong SAR1

The presence of indebtedness is known to be a risk factor that can trigger stressed persons to contemplate suicide. This study compares the profiles of suicides with and without debt problems based on 2002 Coroner's Court death files. The category of men aged 25–39 has seen a 70% increase in suicide rate since 1997, and the number using carbon monoxide poisoning has increased from 1% of the total deaths in 1997 to about 26% of the total deaths in 2002. Suicides associated with debt problems seem to involve fewer mental and physical problems with formal job attachment than do suicides without debt problems. Gambling is a significant contributing factor to unmanageable indebtedness.