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Selecting fillers on emotional appearance improves lineup identification accuracy

journal contribution
posted on 2016-01-28, 15:38 authored by Heather Flowe, Thimna Klatt, Melissa F. Colloff
Mock witnesses sometimes report using criminal stereotypes to identify a face from a lineup, a tendency known as criminal face bias. Faces are perceived as criminal-looking if they appear angry. We tested whether matching the emotional appearance of the fillers to an angry suspect can reduce criminal face bias. In Study 1, mock witnesses (n = 226) viewed lineups in which the suspect had an angry, happy, or neutral expression, and we varied whether the fillers matched the expression. An additional group of participants (n = 59) rated the faces on criminal and emotional appearance. As predicted, mock witnesses tended to identify suspects who appeared angrier and more criminal-looking than the fillers. This tendency was reduced when the lineup fillers matched the emotional appearance of the suspect. Study 2 extended the results, testing whether the emotional appearance of the suspect and fillers affects recognition memory. Participants (n = 1,983) studied faces and took a lineup test in which the emotional appearance of the target and fillers was varied between subjects. Discrimination accuracy was enhanced when the fillers matched an angry target’s emotional appearance. We conclude that lineup member emotional appearance plays a critical role in the psychology of lineup identification. The fillers should match an angry suspect’s emotional appearance to improve lineup identification accuracy.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Law and Human Behavior

Volume

38

Issue

6

Pages

509 - 519

Citation

FLOWE, H.D., KLATT, T. and COLLOFF, M.T., 2014. Selecting fillers on emotional appearance improves lineup identification accuracy. Law and Human Behavior, 38(6), pp. 509-519.

Publisher

© American Psychological Association

Version

  • SMUR (Submitted Manuscript Under Review)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

Draft version 2014. This paper has not been peer reviewed. Please do not copy or cite without author's permission

ISSN

0147-7307

eISSN

1573-661X

Language

  • en

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