Citizen participation in the police domain: The role of citizens' attitude and morality.

Although there is a large potential of citizen capital in fighting crime and creating safer neighborhoods, in reality, only a small fraction of citizens is actively participating. This study examines the relationship between different types of actual participation behavior in the police domain from a citizen's stance and 3 different but interconnected psychological drivers: the attitude toward citizen participation, moral values, and moral emotions. A total of 217 Dutch citizens filled out an online questionnaire, assessing these drivers and the actual participatory actions they engaged in over the past year.

How robust is the language architecture? The case of mood.

In neurocognitive research on language, the processing principles of the system at hand are usually assumed to be relatively invariant. However, research on attention, memory, decision-making, and social judgment has shown that mood can substantially modulate how the brain processes information. For example, in a bad mood, people typically have a narrower focus of attention and rely less on heuristics.

Does suggestive information cause a confirmation bias in bullet comparisons?

Several researchers have argued that the confirmation bias, the tendency to selectively gather and process information such that it fits existing beliefs, is a main threat to objective forensic examinations. The goal of the present study was to empirically investigate whether examiners making bullet comparisons are indeed vulnerable to this bias. In the first experiment, six qualified examiners evaluated 6 sets of bullets that were presented to them twice.

Construction of health preferences: a comparison of direct value assessment and personal narratives.

Background: Most terminally ill patients prefer to die at home rather than at an institution. However, patients are often insufficiently aware of the downsides of staying at home, which signals a need for effective decision aids.

Objectives: The main purpose of the present study was to compare indirect methods of value elicitation (personal narratives["stories"] in text or video) with a direct method (assessment of the subjective importance of each attribute).

Shoe print examinations: effects of expectation, complexity and experience.

Even though trace evidence is becoming more and more important in legal cases, only little is known about the influence of task and context factors on comparative judgments. In the present study we investigated how expectations and complexity affect shoe print examinations and to what extent differences exist between beginners and experienced examiners. Twelve examiners assessed similarity between a shoe print and a shoe for eight different cases.

Disability assessments: effects of response mode and experience.

Purpose: To what extent response mode and experience affect the assessment of disability was investigated.

Method: An experiment was conducted in which 34 medical doctors (17 inexperienced and 15 experienced) were required to assess disability of a videotaped client. Participants either gave a probability assessment after each piece of information or only after all information had been processed (step-by-step, SBS, or end-of-sequence, EOS).