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Skilled investigative interviewing is critical to ensuring that credible witness accounts are gathered in criminal investigations. The current study aimed to determine whether instructions to avoid suggestive questions and pre‐interview knowledge influence both the quality of an interviewer's questioning strategy and the interviewer's memory for the witness' account after a 1‐week delay in a laboratory study using lay student interviewers and witnesses. Results indicated that access to case details prior to the interview did not significantly influence the type or quality of questions asked within the interview itself but significantly influenced interviewers' memories for their interview 1 week later. Those who were blind to case information at the time of the interview had more accurate memories of their witness interviews than those who were correctly or incorrectly pre‐informed. Instructions to avoid suggestive questions served to reduce suggestive questions, regardless of pre‐interview knowledge. Taken together, these findings suggest that pre‐interview preparation may influence investigative outcomes beyond the interview context and traditional measures of witness accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Previous research has highlighted the potentially detrimental effects of pre‐interview preparation on witness memory within an interview context (Rivard et al., 2016). The present study examined the effect of an interviewer's pre‐interview knowledge on eyewitness memory beyond the initial interview. Method: Student witnesses were interviewed one week after viewing a mock crime event by a student interviewer who was either correctly informed, incorrectly informed, or uninformed (blind) to case details and who was either told to avoid suggestions or was not given cautionary instructions. Results: Analyses of the witnesses' recall quantity and quality one week after the interview revealed that witnesses of blind interviewers recalled more details than witnesses of incorrectly informed interviewers. Witnesses of blind interviewers were also more accurate than witnesses of incorrectly informed interviewers, but only when interviewers were warned not to ask suggestive questions. Implications: Findings suggest that interviewer training and pre‐interview knowledge may play an important role in witness recall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This archival study was the first in Sweden, and the first outside of the US and the UK, to apply the (Kelly et al., Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 9, 165–178, 2013) taxonomy of interrogation methods framework to repeated police interrogations of adult suspects in high‐stakes crimes. Audio/video recordings (N = 19) were collected from the Swedish Police Authority of repeated interrogations of three suspects in three criminal cases. The interaction between interrogators and suspects were scored according to the taxonomy framework (Kelly et al., Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 9, 165–178, 2013; Kelly et al., Law and Human Behavior, 40, 295–309, 2016). First, there was an association between the use of different domains. Rapport and relationship building was moderately and negatively associated with confrontation/competition and presentation of evidence. Moreover, confrontation/competition was moderately and positively related to emotion provocation and presentation of evidence. Second, changes were observed during the interrogations. Presentation of evidence was lower in the beginning than in the middle block. Suspect cooperation was higher in the beginning than both the middle and end blocks. Third, an ordered logistic regression showed that rapport and relationship building were associated with increased suspect cooperation, and confrontation/competition and presentation of evidence were associated with decreased cooperation. The study's results are mostly in line with other taxonomy studies on high‐stakes crimes from the US and the UK. The findings are discussed in light of theoretical frameworks, empirical findings, and current police practice. We also highlight the need for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Low-stakes crimes related to alcohol and/or drugs are common around the world, but research is lacking on police–suspect interactions of such crimes. A large proportion of these suspects are intoxicated during interrogations, and many may have substance use disorder, making them potentially vulnerable to interrogative pressure. Methods: To address this lack of knowledge, the taxonomy of interrogation methods framework (i.e., 60C interrogation techniques classified into five domains) and a common classification of question types (appropriate vs. inappropriate) were applied in the coding of written police interrogations. Two archival studies, one pilot (Study 1, N = 39) and one main study (Study 2, N = 97) analyzed police interrogations with suspects of alcohol- and drug-related crimes in Sweden. Results: For both Study 1 and 2, suspects showed signs of alcohol and/or drug intoxication, hangover or withdrawal in more than 50% of all interrogations. In Study 2, additional coding indicated that suspects displayed signs of substance use disorder in 57% of the interrogations. The main results from both studies revealed a large number of direct questions asked by the police across all interrogations, and relatively little use of the strategic interrogation techniques from the taxonomy of interrogation methods framework. In fact, when it came to interrogation techniques, law enforcement used more confrontational techniques in their interactions with intoxicated suspects compared to sober suspects. Furthermore, suspects displaying signs of substance use disorder were significantly more cooperative and prone to confess than suspects without indicators of substance use disorder. Conclusion: As the first novel study on low-stakes crime interrogations related to alcohol and/or drugs, the present study provides useful information about current Swedish interrogation practices and areas for improvement. The study results indicate that suspects displaying signs of intoxication or Frontiers in substance use disorder may be more vulnerable during police interrogations. This may in turn have the potential to inform the development of new interrogation policies. Due to the novelty of this research, more studies are needed, both on a national and international level, to examine interrogations in low-stakes crimes further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many real-world eyewitnesses are under the influence of alcohol either at the time of the crime, the interview, or both. Only recently has empirical research begun to examine the effects of alcohol on witness memory, yielding mixed results. The present study tested the importance of state-dependent memory in the context of alcohol's effects on encoding versus retrieval of a witnessed event, while simultaneously informing real-world investigative practices: Should witnesses sober up before an interview? Participants (N = 249) were randomized to a control, placebo, or alcohol condition at encoding and to either an immediate retrieval condition (in the same state) or a 1-week delay control, placebo, or alcohol retrieval condition. They recalled a witnessed mock crime using open ended and cued recall formats. After a delay, witnesses intoxicated at both encoding and retrieval provided less accurate information than witnesses in sober or placebo groups at both times. There was no advantage of state-dependent memory but intoxicated witnesses were best when recalling immediately compared to 1 week later (sober, placebo, or reintoxicated). Findings have direct implications for the timing of intoxicated witnesses' interviews such that moderately intoxicated witnesses may not benefit from a sobering delay but rather, should be interviewed immediately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of speculation on delayed recall and on source monitoring (SM) as a recantation device were examined in first and fourth graders. Two weeks after a clown show, the speculation group recalled all actions and speculated on half. The control group recalled all actions without speculating. One month and 6 months later, all children recalled all actions. Half the children were given the opportunity to recant at 1 month and all children at 6 months. Even after 6 months, speculation negatively impacted recall. Only first-graders' script-consistent false responses increased with time. In the speculation group, 19% of previously given script-consistent speculations were recanted after 1 month and 20% after 6 months. Older children were better at recanting than younger children. Although recantation via SM immediately after 6-month recall had a positive effect, SM at 1 month had no prospective effect on 6-month recall. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although psychologists have urged police officers to use double blind line-up procedures during their investigations, police officers state that these would be difficult to administer and most have been reluctant to implement this change. Four studies examine whether lay people's judgements about the guilt of a suspect vary according to whether a brief written summary of a case described the identification procedure as double blind or non-double blind. The effects were all small (and almost all non-significant). Most people do not treat double blind line-ups differently from non-double blind line-ups when assessing the guilt of a defendant. Either police investigators should stop using this biased method or police investigators and others in the judicial system (e.g. jurors, judges) should be informed of this bias when evaluating results from any line-up. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study analyzes individual and social network correlates of adolescent engagement in physical intimate partner violence (IPV) utilizing socio-centric data from a high-school population of 242 adolescents from rural Colombia. We studied self-reported victimization and perpetration for boys and girls. First, we used logistic regression to explore the relationship between adolescents' IPV engagement and school peers' IPV engagement, school violence victimization, and social network position, controlling for gender and age (N=111). Second, we used social network statistical methods to investigate if there were more friendships of similar IPV status to the adolescent than expected by chance in their social networks. Our results show that the proportion of friends perpetrating physical IPV increased the probability of adolescents' IPV perpetration. Contrarywise, the proportion of friends experiencing IPV victimization decreased with the adolescent's own victimization. Being a victim (a status significantly more common among boys) was also associated with reporting perpetration for both genders. Furthermore, our results contradicted the social network literature, as we found no preferential ties among perpetrators/victims (e.g., adolescents do not seem to befriend each other by IPV engagement). Our study is unique to the global adolescent IPV literature given the scarcity of research examining physical IPV among adolescents in the context of both girls and boys in the context of their school networks. We also add to the understanding of IPV in the case of the global majority of adolescents with the highest rates of IPV victimization (living in Low and Middle-Income Countries)., Competing Interests: CONFLICTING INTERESTS: The author(s) declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Alcohol typically has a detrimental impact on memory across a variety of encoding and retrieval conditions (e.g., Mintzer, 2007; Ray & Bates, 2006). No research has addressed alcohol's effect on memory for lengthy and interactive events and little has tested alcohol's effect on free recall. In this study 94 participants were randomly assigned to alcohol, placebo, or control groups and consumed drinks in a bar-lab setting while interacting with a "bartender". Immediately afterwards all participants freely recalled the bar interaction. Consistent with alcohol myopia theory, intoxicated participants only differed from placebo and control groups when recalling peripheral information. Expanding on the original hypervigilance hypothesis, placebo participants showed more conservative reporting behaviour than the alcohol or control groups by providing more uncertain and "don't know" responses. Thus, alcohol intoxication had confined effects on memory for events, supporting and extending current theories., (© 2011 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business)