Publications by authors named "Laurence Alison"

Introduction: It is well established that child victims are some of the most challenging populations to interview. Indeed, children tend to feel ashamed, scared or in denial, leading to difficulties for law enforcement when gathering information, and subsequently with prosecuting offenders. Moreover, with crimes against children increasing, it is common for interviewed victims to have experienced several abuses (poly-victimization).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Mass Casualty Incidents (MCIs) rapidly overwhelm the ability of local medical resources to deliver comprehensive and definitive medical care and they have been occurring more frequently in recent decades and affect countries of all socioeconomic backgrounds (Hart et al., 2018). As such, it is important to understand how individuals make such decisions in these events and what factors can hinder or help the process.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - Evidence shows that online only child sexual abuse (OOCSA) has serious negative effects on victims, and understanding its scale can help law enforcement target suspects effectively.
  • - A review identified eleven studies on the impact of OOCSA, revealing five key themes in how it affects victims, while a prevalence study estimated various costs associated with OOCSA, suggesting a significant financial and emotional toll.
  • - The total estimated lifetime costs of OOCSA range from £7.4 million to £1.4 billion, with over 75% of these costs being non-financial impacts on victims, indicating a major social and economic burden that necessitates improved police action and prioritization.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Individuals in positions of power are often required to make high-stakes decisions. The approach-inhibition theory of social power holds that elevated power activates approach-related tendencies, leading to decisiveness and action orientation. However, naturalistic decision-making research has often reported that increased power often has the opposite effect and causes more avoidant decision-making.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Pancreatic cancer is a major cause of cancer-related deaths, and while screening for it could enhance survival rates, current methods aren't suitable for most asymptomatic adults; targeting high-risk groups, especially those with new-onset diabetes (NOD), is crucial.
  • The UK-EDI study will recruit 2,500 adults over 50 with NOD, conducting follow-ups every six months for three years to gather data and biospecimens that can help in developing biomarkers for early detection of pancreatic cancer.
  • The study has received ethical approval and aims to share findings through conferences and peer-reviewed publications, aiming to influence future research and detection strategies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Two studies examined whether rapport-based interviewing with child sexual abuse (CSA) suspects provides greater interview yield that could result in overall cost-savings to the investigation. First, multi-level modelling was applied to 35 naturalistic CSA suspect interviews to establish whether rapport-based interviewing techniques increase "yield" - defined as information of investigative value. The Observing Rapport Based Interviewing Technique (ORBIT coding manual was used to code interviews; it includes an assessment of both interpersonal adaptive and maladaptive rapport-based interviewer engagement as well as motivational interviewing (MI) strategies.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: In this study, we extend the impact of mindfulness to the concept of least-worst decision-making. Least-worst decisions involve high-uncertainty and require the individual to choose between a number of potentially negative courses of action. Research is increasingly exploring least-worst decisions, and real-world events (such as the COVID-19 pandemic) show the need for individuals to overcome uncertainty and commit to a least-worst course of action.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In 2013, there were an estimated 50,000 individuals involved in downloading and sharing indecent images of children (IIOC) in the United Kingdom (UK). This poses challenges for limited police resources. We argue that police officers can make most effective use of limited resources by prioritizing those offenders who pose the greatest risk of contact offending, by nature of demonstrable pedophilia, hebephilia or dual offending status and thus, those at highest risk must be dealt with first.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Police officers around the world must often select between equally unappealing, uncertain courses of action in an attempt to achieve the best outcome. Despite the immense importance of such decisions, there remains a lack of understanding in the study of individual differences in police decision-making. Here, using a sample of senior police officers recruited from decision-making training events across the United Kingdom ( = 96), we used the Least-worst Uncertain Choice Inventory For Emergency Responses (LUCIFER) to measure the effect of maximization on both domain-specific (police) and domain-general (military) decisions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Individuals responsible for decision-making during critical incidents must wrestle with uncertainty, complexity, time pressure, and accountability. Critical incidents are defined as rare events where demand outstrips resources and where there are high stakes, uncertainty, and dynamic and ever-shifting elements that frustrate clear predictions. This paper argues that critical-incident decision-making is highly complex because many critical incidents have no such analogue, and thus there is no prior experience to draw upon.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Motivational interviewing (MI) is an evidence-based intervention that has proved effective across diverse clinical contexts with clients ambivalent about and resistant to behavioral change. This article argues that the principles of MI can be successfully applied to law enforcement (LE) interviews with high-value detainees (HVDs; i.e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Unlabelled: Research demonstrates that information sharing is facilitated by familiarity, and having a common understanding of problems, use of lexicon, and semantic meaning. These factors can be difficult to develop within extreme environments such as disasters as members of the multi-agency system that responds often have limited experience of working together. Public inquiries repeatedly highlight the impact of information sharing difficulties on public safety, but limited academic research has focused on identifying concrete behaviours that facilitate interteam information sharing within such environments.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - The review discusses the long-standing use of harsh interrogation methods since World War II, highlighting their legal and ethical issues, as well as the lack of evidence supporting their effectiveness.
  • - It contrasts these methods with rapport-based techniques, which emphasize building trust and relationships, backed by research showing their efficacy in interrogation settings.
  • - The authors advocate for two main points: psychologists should uphold the Hippocratic Oath to avoid harm and recognize the effectiveness of rapport-based methods over revenge-driven tactics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

By reference to a live hostage negotiation exercise, this study presents a taxonomy of uncertainty that can be usefully applied to assist in the categorization and application of findings from decision-making research conducted in naturalistic (specifically critical incident) settings. Uncertainty was measured via observational methods (during the exercise and by reference to video footage), decision logs, and postincident simulated recall interviews with trainee police officers. Transcripts were coded and analyzed thematically.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

There is a great deal of controversy concerning paraphilia, and defining what is normal versus deviant or disordered, given that this is to some degree dependent on cultural views of acceptability. In this article, we outline these issues and describe recent progress in diagnosing and treating paraphilias.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

When individuals perceive time pressure, they decrease the generation of diagnostic hypotheses and prioritize information. This article examines whether individual differences in (a) internal time urgency, (b) experience, and (c) fluid mental ability can moderate these effects. Police officers worked through a computer-based rape investigative scenario, in which 35 were subjected to a time pressure manipulation, with their hypotheses generation and prioritization skills compared with a control (n = 41).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This paper examines the extent to which orthodoxy (degree of typicality) and congruence (degree of similarity with own opinion) mediate the influence of expert advice on decision makers' judgments. Overall, 227 members of the public and 60 police officers completed an online questionnaire involving an investigation into a child sex offence. Participants were asked to first (i) formulate their own "profile" of a likely offender then (ii) estimate the guilt of two presented suspect descriptions (orthodox vs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

According to the phenomenon of hindsight bias, once people know the outcome of an event, they tend to have biased estimates of the probability that the event would have occurred. In this study, we investigated whether hindsight bias affected judgements about the legitimacy of lethal force decisions in police shooting incidents for counter-terrorism operations. We also assessed to what extent this hindsight bias was mediated by factors such as role and information quality.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Utilizing a sample of 85 stranger rapists, three models (Hazelwood's (1987) Power and Anger FBI model, the Behavioral Thematic evaluation of Canter, Bennell, Alison, and Reddy (2003), and the Massachusetts Treatment Center: Rape classification system revision 3 (MTC:R3, Knight & Prentky, 1990)) were contrasted with a multivariate regression approach to assess their ability to predict an offender's previous convictions from crime scene information. In respect of the three aforementioned models, logistic regression and AUC analysis indicated that the Power and Anger FBI model was the most effective, followed by the MTC:R3, and then the Behavioral Thematic evaluation. However, predictive analyses based on a multivariate approach using a mixture of crime scene behaviors, as opposed to the grouping of behaviors into themes or types as in the three models, far exceeded the predictive ability of the three models under AUC analysis.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - The text discusses the ongoing debate about offender profiling, specifically how crime scene details can help infer characteristics about the offender.
  • - It argues that understanding the context of a crime, particularly the relationship between victim and offender age, can enhance the accuracy of profiling by highlighting important factors like planning and aggression.
  • - A study analyzing 85 stranger rape cases found that victim age is a reliable predictor of offender age only when certain conditions, such as the level of planning and aggression, are met, suggesting more nuanced methods are needed for effective profiling.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Results from some new analyses as well as a selective review of the results of six empirical studies on a self-identified sample of sadomasochistically-oriented individuals (22 women and 162 men) with an emphasis on differences between gay and straight participants are presented. The gay male respondents seemed to be better educated, to hold white-collar occupations and to be more sadistically oriented. The gay male respondents became aware of their sadomasochistic preferences and had their first experiences at an older age.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study hypothesizes that stranger rape victims' statements will show varying levels of violation, categorized from personal to physical to sexual violations.
  • It suggests that these offenses can be classified into four main themes: hostile, controlling, stealing, or involving.
  • Analysis of crime scene data from 112 incidents supports the idea of a composite model of rape that emphasizes hostility and pseudo-intimacy over traditional notions of power and control, impacting how rape is classified, investigated, and how victims are treated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This study explores the extent to which 29 individual sexual behaviors, previously identified in L. Alison, P. Santtila, N.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF