Lorraine Hope

Exposure duration: effects on eyewitness accuracy and confidence

The current study examined the relationship between the length of exposure to a face in an eyewitness setting and identification accuracy and confidence. A sample of 164 young (ages 17-25) and older (ages 59-81) adults viewed a simulated crime in which they saw the culprits face for a short (12 s) or long (45 s) duration. They were then tested with a target absent (a line-up not containing the culprit) or target present line-up. Identification accuracy rates for both young and older participants were significantly higher under the long exposure condition. In the short exposure condition, witnesses who had made a correct identification of the target were more confident than incorrect witnesses. In the long exposure condition the confidence ratings of accurate and inaccurate witnesses did not differ. Discussion focuses on the extent to which extended exposure may inflate confidence judgments and variables that may moderate the relationship between exposure duration and face recognition accuracy.

Investment in workforce health: exploring the implications for workforce safety climate and commitment.

The relationship between investment in employee health and non-health outcomes has received little research attention. Drawing from social exchange and climate theory, the current study uses a multilevel approach to examine the implications of worksite health investment for worksite safety and health climate and employee safety compliance and commitment to the worksite. Data were collected from 1932 personnel working on 31 offshore installations operating in UK waters. Installation medics provided corporate workforce health investment details for 20 of these installations. The findings provide support for a strong link between health investment practices and worksite safety and health climate. The results also found a relationship between health investment practices and organizational commitment among employees. These results suggest that health investment practices are associated with committed workforces and climates that reflect a priority on health and safety.

Eyewitness recognition errors: The effects of mugshot viewing and choosing in young and old adults

Eyewitness memory is vulnerable to information encountered prior to a lineup. Young (18–30 years) and older (60–80 years) witnesses viewed a crime video. Some witnesses were then exposed to mugshots of innocent suspects that included a critical foil. After a 48-h delay, all the witnesses took part in a targetabsent lineup that included the critical foil and fivenew foils. Witnesses who picked one of the mugshots as the likely perpetrator showed inflated rates of choosing the critical foil from the lineup. Context reinstatement instructions did not reduce choices of innocent foils following mugshot exposure. Despite age-related increases in false choosing, age did not qualify other effects. The results are discussed in terms of commitment, source memory, and gist-based processing.

Understanding Pretrial Publicity: Predecisional Distortion of Evidence by Mock Jurors

Prejudicial pretrial publicity (PTP) constitutes a serious source of juror bias. The current study examined differences in predecisional distortion for mock jurors exposed to negative PTP (N-PTP) versus nonexposed control participants. According to work by K. A. Carlson and J. E. Russo (2001), predecisional distortion occurs when jurors bias new evidence in favor of their current leading party (prosecution or defense) rather than evaluating this information for its actual probative properties. Jury-eligible university students (N=116) acted as jurors in a mock trial. Elevated rates of guilty verdicts were observed in the N-PTP condition. Predecisional distortion scores were significantly higher in the N-PTP condition and reflected a proprosecution bias. The effect of prejudicial PTP on verdict outcomes was mediated by predecisional distortion in the evaluation of testimony. Results are discussed in relation to motivated decision making and confirmation biases.

Eliciting Reliable Information in Investigative Interviews

Interviews are an important part of investigations, as the information obtained from interviewees generates leads and evidence. However, for several psychological reasons, even cooperative victims and witnesses do not spontaneously report all the information they know, and their accounts may incorporate errors. Furthermore, suspects often deliberately withhold information or may attempt to mislead the interviewer. First, known psychological factors promote complete and accurate reports by cooperative witnesses and victims. Such factors relate to the social dynamics between the witness and interviewer (e.g., developing rapport), the interviewee’s and the interviewer’s cognitive processes, and communication between the witness and interviewer. Empirical research examines interviewing techniques that incorporate these interviewing principles. Second, some suspects may be reluctant to volunteer information. Typically, two interview styles encourage suspects to talk: An information-gathering style seeks to establish rapport with interviewees and uses open-ended exploratory questions to elicit information and establish guilt. An accusatorial style uses closed-ended confirmatory questions to elicit confessions. The former approach performs better at eliciting accurate information and true confessions. In any interview, the ability to detect truth from deceit is important. Many lie detection techniques are based on listening to speech or observing behavior, but only some discriminate between truth and deceit.

Police and Public Perceptions of Stalking: The Role of Prior Victim–Offender Relationship

One in every five women will experience stalking in their lifetime. Research suggests the lifetime prevalence rate ranges between 12% and 32% for among women and 4% and 17% among men. The majority of stalking victims have had some form of prior relationship with their stalker. The aim of the current study was to examine whether victim–offender relationship influences police officers’ perception of a stalking event. Police officers (n = 132) and lay participants (n = 225) read one of three stalking scenarios where the nature of relationship between the victim and the stalker was manipulated to reflect an ex-intimate, work acquaintance, or stranger relationship. Results revealed that, for both samples, prior victim–offender relationship affected the extent to which the scenario was perceived to involve stalking behavior, with the stranger stalker scenario endorsed as most strongly constituting a case of stalking. Officer experience of stalking cases mitigated some prevalent stereotypical beliefs concerning stalking (e.g., victim responsibility). The findings suggest that further training is necessary to combat common misconceptions surrounding stalking. The importance of understanding how both lay and police responses are influenced by the perceived victim–offender relationship is discussed in relation to the development of public awareness campaigns and police officer training.

Witnesses in Action The Effect of Physical Exertion on Recall and Recognition

Understanding memory performance under different operational conditions is critical in many occupational settings. To examine the effect of physical exertion on memory for a witnessed event, we placed two groups of law-enforcement officers in a live, occupationally relevant scenario. One group had previously completed a high-intensity physical-assault exercise, and the other had not. Participants who completed the assault exercise showed impaired recall and recognition performance compared with the control group. Specifically, they provided significantly less accurate information concerning critical and incidental target individuals encountered during the scenario, recalled less briefing information, and provided fewer briefing updates than control participants did. Exertion was also associated with reduced accuracy in identifying the critical target from a lineup. These results support arousal-based competition accounts proposing differential allocation of resources under physiological arousal. These novel findings relating to eyewitness memory performance have important implications for victims, ordinary citizens who become witnesses, and witnesses in policing, military, and related operational contexts.

Providing eyewitnesses with initial retrieval support: what works at immediate and subsequent recall?

The effect of retrieval support on eyewitness recall was investigated in two experiments. Based on the outshining hypothesis, Experiment 1 tested whether retrieval support enhances witness performance (compared to free recall) especially when witnessing conditions are suboptimal (e.g., because witnesses were distracted during the crime). Eighty-eight participants watched a videotaped crime with either full or divided attention and subsequently received retrieval support with the Self-Administered Interview© (SAI) or completed a free recall (FR). One week later (Time 2 – T2) all participants completed a second FR. Unexpectedly, retrieval support did not lead to better memory performance than FR under divided attention conditions, suggesting that retrieval support is not effective to overcome adverse effects of divided attention. Moreover, presence of retrieval support at Time 1 (T1) had no effect on memory performance at T2. Experiment 2 (N = 81) tested the hypothesis that these T2-results were due to a reporting issue undermining the memory-preserving effect of T1-retrieval support by manipulating retrieval support (SAI vs. FR) at T1 and T2. As expected, T1-retrieval support led to increased accuracy at T2. Thus, the beneficial value of T1-retrieval support seems greatest with high-quality T2-interviews. Interviewers should consider this when planning a subsequent interview.

Who should I look at? Eye contact during collective interviewing as a cue to deceit

Pairs of liars and pairs of truth tellers were interviewed and the amount of eye contact they made with the interviewer and each other was coded. Given that liars take their credibility less for granted than truth tellers, we expected liars to monitor the interviewer to see whether they were being believed, and to try harder to convince the interviewer that they were telling the truth. It was hypothesised that this monitoring would manifest itself through more eye contact with the interviewer and less eye contact with each other than in the case of truth tellers. A total of 43 pairs of participants took part in the experiment. Truth tellers had lunch in a nearby restaurant. Liars took some money from a purse, and were asked to pretend that instead of taking the money, they had been to a nearby restaurant together for lunch. Pairs of liars looked less at each other and displayed more eye contact with the interviewer than pairs of truth tellers. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Postincident conferring by law enforcement officers: determining the impact of team discussions on statement content, accuracy, and officer beliefs

In many jurisdictions, law enforcement officers are permitted to discuss their recall of an incident when preparing their official statement. This practice has been criticized on the grounds that it lacks transparency and may produce inaccurate corroborative accounts. In the current study, 300 armed officers took part in an interactive staged crime scenario and were permitted to confer (or not) while writing statements. Alternative procedures for statement production by teams were also evaluated. Some officers also provided an independent statement prior to conferring while others were provided with retrieval support instructions. Although errors were transmitted during discussions, conferring had no overall impact on the accuracy or content of final statements. However, officers who wrote an initial independent statement did not incorporate any errors obtained from colleagues into their final accounts. Conferring officers expressed greater confidence in the accuracy of their accounts than nonconferring officers despite no differences in accuracy.