A nod in the wrong direction : Does nonverbal feedback affect eyewitness confidence in interviews?

Eyewitnesses can be influenced by an interviewer's behaviour and report information with inflated confidence as a result. Previous research has shown that positive feedback administered verbally can affect the confidence attributed to testimony, but the effect of non-verbal influence in interviews has been given little attention. This study investigated whether positive or negative non-verbal feedback could affect the confidence witnesses attribute to their responses. Participants witnessed staged CCTV footage of a crime scene and answered 20 questions in a structured interview, during which they were given either positive feedback (a head nod), negative feedback (a head shake) or no feedback. Those presented with positive non-verbal feedback reported inflated confidence compared with those presented with negative non-verbal feedback regardless of accuracy, and this effect was most apparent when participants reported awareness of the feedback. These results provide further insight into the effects of interviewer behaviour in investigative interviewsPeer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Word contexts enhance the neural representation of individual letters in early visual cortex

Visual context facilitates perception, but how this is neurally implemented remains unclear. One example of contextual facilitation is found in reading, where letters are more easily identified when embedded in a word. Bottom-up models explain this word advantage as a post-perceptual decision bias, while top-down models propose that word contexts enhance perception itself. Here, we arbitrate between these accounts by presenting words and nonwords and probing the representational fidelity of individual letters using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In line with top-down models, we find that word contexts enhance letter representations in early visual cortex. Moreover, we observe increased coupling between letter information in visual cortex and brain activity in key areas of the reading network, suggesting these areas may be the source of the enhancement. Our results provide evidence for top-down representational enhancement in word recognition, demonstrating that word contexts can modulate perceptual processing already at the earliest visual regions

Deception and self-awareness

This paper presents a study conducted for the Shades of Grey EPSRC research project (EP/H02302X/1), which aims to develop a suite of interventions for identifying terrorist activities. The study investigated the body movements demonstrated by participants while waiting to be interviewed, in one of two conditions: preparing to lie or preparing to tell the truth. The effect of self-awareness was also investigated, with half of the participants sitting in front of a full length mirror during the waiting period. The other half faced a blank wall. A significant interaction was found for the duration of hand/arm movements between the deception and self-awareness conditions (F=4.335, df=1;76, p<0.05). Without a mirror, participants expecting to lie spent less time moving their hands than those expecting to tell the truth; the opposite was seen in the presence of a mirror. This finding indicates a new research area worth further investigation

Recognizing Emotions in a Foreign Language

Expressions of basic emotions (joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust) can be recognized pan-culturally from the face and it is assumed that these emotions can be recognized from a speaker's voice, regardless of an individual's culture or linguistic ability. Here, we compared how monolingual speakers of Argentine Spanish recognize basic emotions from pseudo-utterances ("nonsense speech") produced in their native language and in three foreign languages (English, German, Arabic). Results indicated that vocal expressions of basic emotions could be decoded in each language condition at accuracy levels exceeding chance, although Spanish listeners performed significantly better overall in their native language ("in-group advantage"). Our findings argue that the ability to understand vocally-expressed emotions in speech is partly independent of linguistic ability and involves universal principles, although this ability is also shaped by linguistic and cultural variables

STEPS - an approach for human mobility modeling

In this paper we introduce Spatio-TEmporal Parametric Stepping (STEPS) - a simple parametric mobility model which can cover a large spectrum of human mobility patterns. STEPS makes abstraction of spatio-temporal preferences in human mobility by using a power law to rule the nodes movement. Nodes in STEPS have preferential attachment to favorite locations where they spend most of their time. Via simulations, we show that STEPS is able, not only to express the peer to peer properties such as inter-ontact/contact time and to reflect accurately realistic routing performance, but also to express the structural properties of the underlying interaction graph such as small-world phenomenon. Moreover, STEPS is easy to implement, exible to configure and also theoretically tractable

Global wellposed problem for the 3-D incompressible anisotropic Navier-Stokes equations

In this paper, we consider a global wellposed problem for the 3-D incompressible anisotropic Navier-Stokes equations (\textit{ANS}). In order to do so, we first introduce the scaling invariant Besov-Sobolev type spaces, $B^{-1+\frac{2}{p},{1/2}}_{p}$ and $B^{-1+\frac{2}{p},{1/2}}_{p}(T)$, $p\geq2$. Then, we prove the global wellposedness for (\textit{ANS}) provided the initial data are sufficient small compared to the horizontal viscosity in some suitable sense, which is stronger than $B^{-1+\frac{2}{p},{1/2}}_{p}$ norm. In particular, our results imply the global wellposedness of (\textit{ANS}) with high oscillatory initial data.Comment: 39 page

Making Energy Metrics Relevant to Service Firms: From Energy Conservation to Energy Productivity

Although energy conservation and reduction in environmental impact are on the international and most national agendas, service firms rarely include energy consumption metrics in their strategic decision-making. One reason for the omission is that for service industries, firm level energy utilization is most commonly measured in kilowatt hours per square meter of office space where changes often related to the space rather than the firm performance. The measure also presents several problems for firms in service industries. First, energy conservation and reduction may be counterproductive for service firms that are growing and require energy to sustain that growth. Second, it may not relate to national and international goals which are often focused on the amount of carbon dioxide produced generating energy than the total amount of energy consumed. Third, it treats energy as a utility rather than a resource in firms’ value creation. Results from a field study focused on service firms in Sweden suggests that focusing on energy productivity overcomes the limitations of existing measures and produces positive results. By conceptualizing energy productivity as output per unit of energy, we create a conservation metric that enables service firms to measure their contributions to energy consumption relative to national economic growth. As a result, energy productivity aligns the interests of service organizations with those of policy makers and conservationists

Interactions between visceral afferent signaling and stimulus processing

Visceral afferent signals to the brain influence thoughts, feelings and behaviour. Here we highlight the findings of a set of empirical investigations in humans concerning body-mind interaction that focus on how feedback from states of autonomic arousal shapes cognition and emotion. There is a longstanding debate regarding the contribution of the body, to mental processes. Recent theoretical models broadly acknowledge the role of (autonomically mediated) physiological arousal to emotional, social and motivational behaviours, yet the underlying mechanisms are only partially characterized. Neuroimaging is overcoming this shortfall; first, by demonstrating correlations between autonomic change and discrete patterns of evoked, and task- independent, neural activity; second, by mapping the central consequences of clinical perturbations in autonomic response and; third, by probing how dynamic fluctuations in peripheral autonomic state are integrated with perceptual, cognitive and emotional processes. Building on the notion that an important source of the brain’s representation of physiological arousal is derived from afferent information from arterial baroreceptors, we have exploited the phasic nature of these signals to show their differential contribution to the processing of emotionally-salient stimuli. This recent work highlights the facilitation at neural and behavioral levels of fear and threat processing that contrasts with the more established observations of the inhibition of central pain processing during baroreceptors activation. The implications of this body-brain-mind axis are discussed

Evolution of Growth Habit, Inflorescence Architecture, Flower Size, and Fruit Type in Rubiaceae: Its Ecological and Evolutionary Implications

During angiosperm evolution, innovations in vegetative and reproductive organs have resulted in tremendous morphological diversity, which has played a crucial role in the ecological success of flowering plants. Morindeae (Rubiaceae) display considerable diversity in growth form, inflorescence architecture, flower size, and fruit type. Lianescent habit, head inflorescence, small flower, and multiple fruit are the predominant states, but arborescent habit, non-headed inflorescence, large flower, and simple fruit states occur in various genera. This makes Morindeae an ideal model for exploring the evolutionary appearances and transitions between the states of these characters. We reconstructed ancestral states for these four traits using a Bayesian approach and combined nuclear/chloroplast data for 61 Morindeae species. The aim was to test three hypotheses: 1) self-supporting habit is generally ancestral in clades comprising both lianescent and arborescent species; 2) changes from lianescent to arborescent habit are uncommon due to a high degree of specialization and developmental burden ; 3) head inflorescences and multiple fruits in Morindeae evolved from non-headed inflorescences and simple fruits, respectively. Lianescent habit, head inflorescence, large flower, and multiple fruit are inferred for Morindeae, making arborescent habit, non-headed inflorescence, small flower, and simple fruit derived within the tribe. The rate of change from lianescent to arborescent habit is much higher than the reverse change. Therefore, evolutionary changes between lianescent and arborescent forms can be reversible, and their frequency and trends vary between groups. Moreover, these changes are partly attributed to a scarcity of host trees for climbing plants in more open habitats. Changes from large to small flowers might have been driven by shifts to pollinators with progressively shorter proboscis, which are associated with shifts in breeding systems towards dioecy. A single origin of dioecy from hermaphroditism is supported. Finally, we report evolutionary changes from headed to non-headed inflorescences and multiple to simple fruits