Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling最新文献

The Cognitive Interview is a memory-enhancing interview protocol designed to optimise the access and retrieval of eyewitness memories. Its Mental Reinstatement of Context (MRC) component requires interviewees to mentally reconstruct the crime event they witnessed. Individual differences in mental time travel (MTT) relate to the extent to which a person mentally re-experiences personal events from his or her past. Individual differences in MTT have been found to predict correct recall of a simulated crime event under immediate MRC recall conditions. To explore the relationship between MTT and performance under MRC conditions further, the present study presented a simulated crime video to 30 police officers and 26 members of the public. Eyewitness recall was tested under MRC conditions either immediately or 1 week later. Participants' general MTT and also MTT relating specifically to the crime video itself were measured via self-report. Less correct information and more confabulations were produced after 1 week, but delay had no effect on the amount of incorrect information reported. No difference in recall was found between police officers and members of the public. Better quality MTT relating to the crime video was found to be a positive predictor of the amount of information correctly recalled under immediate conditions but not after 1 week. General MTT scores did not predict correct recall under either delay condition. Interviewers need to be aware that, due to individual differences, some witnesses may perform better under the MRC component than others.

The purpose of the study was to examine the effectiveness of the micro-expressions training tool (METT) in identifying and using micro-expressions to improve lie detection. Participants (n = 90) were randomly assigned to receive training in micro-expressions recognition, a bogus control training, or no training. All participants made veracity judgements of five randomly selected videos of targets providing deceptive or truthful statements. With the use of the Bayesian analyses, we found that the METT group did not outperform those in the bogus training and no training groups. Further, overall accuracy was slightly below chance. Implications of these results are discussed.

Despite a large body of research investigating the effects of age and gender on eyewitness suggestibility, the majority of studies has focussed on the impressionability of participants when attempting to recall the presence of items from an event. Very little research has attempted to investigate the effects of age and gender on the suggestibility of eyewitnesses when attempting to attribute blame. Participants (N = 268) viewed and discussed a crime (video) with cowitnesses before giving individual statements. Confederates were used to expose the participants to misinformation during the discussion, suggesting that the wrong bystander was responsible for the offence. Findings indicated that participants who encountered the misinformation were more likely to make a false blame attribution and were more confident in their erroneous judgements. The results found no significant age- or gender-related differences in blame conformity rates; however, male eyewitnesses showed greater levels of overconfidence in their false responses than female participants, after encountering cowitness misinformation.

Although a great deal of research has focussed on and continues to focus on fraud prevention and detection, there is still no reliable way to predict who will become a white-collar criminal/fraudster. Significant benefits would result if and when this can be done. This paper recognizes that there are many common characteristics that exist among fraudsters and investigates whether fraud can be predicted based on the psychological, sociological, and environmental state of children throughout their upbringing. Research shows that children with a negative childhood develop negative habits, emotions, and mentalities, including disorders that can linger well into their adult lives. These negative characteristics can ruin relationships and possibly even influence an individual to commit fraud. This paper provides initial evidence regarding the potential significance of some childhood characteristics that may contribute to the likelihood that someone will become a white-collar criminal. Given that no other similar research exists, this paper may help guide future researchers who are also attempting to solve this complex problem.

Innocent suspects interviewed by a guilt-presumptive versus innocence-presumptive or neutral interviewer may tend more to display non-verbal behaviours which neutral judges consider indicative of guilt. We examined the effects of interviewer's presumption of guilt on innocent mock suspects' alibis. Participants (N = 90) provided an alibi to convince an interviewer of their innocence of a theft after she implied that she believed that they were guilty or innocent or that she had no belief about their veracity. On the basis of existing conflicting findings for suspects' verbal behaviour during accusatory interviews, we predicted that alibis in the guilt-belief condition would contain the highest or lowest number of correct details with overall higher or poorer accuracy rates, respectively. Although participants perceived the interviewer's presumptive approach, the number of correct details provided and accuracy rates of alibis did not differ significantly between conditions. We propose explanations to these findings and future research paths.

Policymakers have a duty to base their decision making in the best available evidence relevant to the question at hand. This paper discusses why it is important for policymakers to recognize the valuable contributions to be made from within the fields of investigative and forensic psychology and particularly to inform the process of policymaking and legislative frameworks currently in place regarding suspicious approaches to children offences in the Irish Criminal Justice System. Discrepancies between legal and psychological considerations infer potential issues with policymaking; resulting in evidence-based concerns regarding how suspicious approaches to children are handled. It is argued that in cases of suspicious approaches to children, important research is available within the fields of investigative and forensic psychology that warrants adequate consideration by policymakers. Additionally, the need for further collaboration between policymakers, researchers and front-line enforcement agencies to ensure evidence-based approaches for dealing with suspicious approaches to children and other criminal behaviours within the Irish criminal justice system is highlighted.

Crime linkage has been the subject of increasing attention in academic research. Research has found support for the principles of behavioural consistency and distinctiveness, which underpin crime linkage, but this does not provide direct evidence as to whether crime linkage is useful in practice. This literature review draws together documentation that refers to the practice of crime linkage, from assessing analysts' efficacy, to discussing the usage of computerised tools to assist with the linkage process, to providing a comprehensive outline of the process itself. The implications of the amount and type of information currently available are discussed, including the variations in practice and terminology that were explored. Avenues for future investigation and the manner in which future research could be conducted are set out in a research agenda.

During forensic interviews, eyewitnesses are to retrieve correct information from memory. Cognitive load should be high, leading to risks of giving in to suggestive questions and difficulties in memory retrieval generally. Testifying in a non-native vs. native language may require even more cognitive effort due to the need to inhibit the interference of the native language. Such witnesses may also be more motivated to appear credible because they often belong to ethnic outgroups relative to forensic professionals, risking more scepticism. In this study, Swedish participants (N = 51) reported their memory of a simulated crime event either in English (non-native language) or in Swedish (native language) and were tested for suggestibility and accuracy. Results showed that English-speaking witnesses yielded to more suggestive questions, perceived themselves as less credible but were equally accurate. Results suggest that testifying in a non-native language is taxing cognitive resources, in turn increasing suggestibility and suboptimal memory search.

Little is known about the mechanisms underlying how interviewers establish and monitor baselines of respondent behaviour. This study addresses this knowledge gap by characterising the practice of establishing baselines and measuring the accuracy of interviewer judgements based on assessments of baseline and departure behaviours. Eighteen professional interviewers viewed two videos of naturalistic interviews, reported the cues they perceived as informative for establishing and assessing a baseline, and diagnosed respondents' internal states. Participants reported multiple cue types as informative, but predominantly relied on non-verbal cues. Overall, participants were sensitive to 27% of respondents' identified internal states but showed improvement over time. They achieved a hit rate of 20% during early interview stages and a hit rate of 33% during late stages. Although non-verbal cues dominated reports, attending to verbal cues afforded participants greater efficiency in identifying respondent internal states. Implications and recommendations for practice are discussed.

This study compared the ability of seven statistical models to distinguish between linked and unlinked crimes. The seven models utilised geographical, temporal, and modus operandi information relating to residential burglaries (n = 180), commercial robberies, (n = 118), and car thefts (n = 376). Model performance was assessed using receiver operating characteristic analysis and by examining the success with which the seven models could successfully prioritise linked over unlinked crimes. The regression-based and probabilistic models achieved comparable accuracy and were generally more accurate than the tree-based models tested in this study. The Logistic algorithm achieved the highest area under the curve (AUC) for residential burglary (AUC = 0.903) and commercial robbery (AUC = 0.830) and the SimpleLogistic algorithm achieving the highest for car theft (AUC = 0.820). The findings also indicated that discrimination accuracy is maximised (in some situations) if behavioural domains are utilised rather than individual crime scene behaviours and that the AUC should not be used as the sole measure of accuracy in behavioural crime linkage research.