Hall and Player - Forensic Evidence Collection & Processing

• Aims

  To investigate wether:

  1) IF the fingerprint experts were emotionally affected by the case details

  2) If emotional context would bias the final judgement
• How did they investigate aim 1

  Questionaire
• How did they investigate aim 2

  Asked to analyse a poor quality fingerprint
• Participants

  70 fingerprint experts working for the MET fingerprint bureau

  selected
• Method


  Independent measures
• IV

  Emotional context

  Low emotion (forgery), high emotion (murder- clear victim)
• DV

  Wether:

  Anlalysts reported feeling affected by the context creating scenarios

  Affected their final decision about the fingerprint
• Materials

  Fingerprint from a known source which was scanned and put onto the corner of a £50 note
• What was each p given

  Copies of the fingerprint and the suspects prints

  Crime scene examiners report
• Procedure

  Asked to examine and say if it was/not a match or not detailed enough to compare

  Asked if they had referred to the crime scene report prior and if they had they were asked about if they thought the info affected their analysis
• Results Aim 1

  They were emotionally affected

  Majority read the crime report

  52% of the 30 in the high emotional context were affected by the info

  There is a relationship between the type of context and the emotional effect
• Results aim 2


  The final decisions made by th experts are very similar for the two emotional context and no significant difference was found
• Conclusions

  Emotional context does affect experts emotions

  It does NOT influence the final outcomes

  In comparison to Dror shows that experienced experts are better at doing analyses in a detached manner than non experts