When Emotions Get the Better of Us: The Effect of Contextual Top-down Processing on Matching Fingerprints
Evidence to support the main argument
Fingerprint identification involves a decision-making process. There are no 100% identical fingerprints as even if the person provides sets of prints one after the other, they will be slightly different. Hence, the person needs to decide if fingerprints are similar enough to conclude that they match. The authors of the study believe that examining how emotional state influences fingerprint identification is vital as matching occurs within a highly sensitive context due to its association with the crime. Hence, researchers refer to the group of studies that agree that emotions influence how individuals interpret information and that it corresponds to their emotional state.
Moreover, they examined studies that involved looking at lexical ambiguity and revealed that anxiety was “linked with increased tendencies to adopt negative interpretations” (Dror, Peron, & Hind, 2005, p. 801). For the research, scholars used photos of the Affective Photographic Gallery that has proven to evoke an emotional state. They also followed an established paradigm of the subliminal message to check the strength of top-down influence.
Explanation of the research
The research observed how top-down information influences decisions individuals make when matching fingerprints. Scholars manipulated the participant’s emotional state and motivation to see if top-down manipulation can affect their decision-making, and to what extent. Background of the crime and emotionally provoking photographs were used as manipulation components. They also used subliminal priming, which means subjects are not aware of the stimuli as they occur quickly; however, stimuli still influence them. Hence, researchers used words such as “guilty” and “same” to check general vulnerability to the top-down processes.
Moreover, they examined the possible strength of the top-down component as they made the match more complicated and created various levels of ambiguity in the bottom-up information that was provided to participants. 27 university student volunteers participated in the study, and nine of them were males. Out of the ninety-six pairs of selected fingerprints, researchers narrowed them to 48 pairs that could not be identified.
The researchers chose stories with a low emotional impact that included crimes such as burglary or bicycle theft. The high emotional crime involved murder or other cases in which the victim is hurt. Then, photographs were presented to induce the emotional state further. The next level of the top-down bias included subliminal messages. All participants were put in the same conditions and were examined individually. Researchers presented 96 trials to them, and after showing low and high emotional stories and photographs and exposing participants to the subliminal priming, they needed to make a quick decision whether the fingerprint matches by pressing the according button on the keyboard.
Conclusion
Emotions and subliminal message manipulations can affect the decision-making process. However, it does not influence the process when there is a clear match, which means that the top-down component is not crucial in decision-making.
Anxiety, Processing Efficiency, and Cognitive Performance
Evidence to support the main argument
The study aims to discover how anxiety can affect cognitive tasks under laboratory conditions. The research relies on the historical background and focuses on theories such as processing efficiency theory, which was the precursor to attentional control theory. Such theories state that the individual is not able to pay enough attention to the task due to irrelevant thoughts such as worry or self-preoccupation. Scholars also referred to the Hansen and Hansen discovery that angry facial expression is detected faster among happy expressions; however, in the crowd of angry expressions, happy faces are the slowest to be recognized. Moreover, further findings discover that people with a high level of anxiety are slower than less anxious ones to find a happy face in the crowd.
Explanation of the research
For the first experiment, participants were asked to read a text, where one of them was neutral, and the other had thread-related distractor words that were not related to the story. After reading a story, participants needed to complete a comprehensive task. Researchers manipulated state anxiety to enhance its effects by saying to one group that others will evaluate their comprehension ability. As eye movements were recorded, the results showed that individuals with high levels of anxiety took the longest to read. This test showed that individuals with anxiety could not perform tasks as effectively as people with a low level of anxiety.
For the second experiment that is related to the Hansen and Hansen study, participants were asked to find an odd face using the “face-in-the-crowd paradigm that manipulated the facial expressions of target and crowd” (Derakshan & Eysenck, 2009, p. 173). Results confirmed the previous findings showing that participants indicate a happy target slower. The eye movement was recorded and helped to find the correlation between such findings and individuals with anxiety as they were checking other distractor faces after fixating the target. Hence, target processing efficiency has been reduced due to anxiety, which is predicted by the attentional control theory.
Conclusion
The research provides a solid base for further study, concluding several significant findings. Firstly, eye movement detection and behavioral measures should be included in every study. Secondly, scholars need to conduct more research that would perform tasks that reflect a single underlying process. Lastly, processing efficiency can be accessed by combining neuroimaging and behavioral data.
References
Derakshan, N., & Eysenck, M. W. (2009). Anxiety, Processing Efficiency, and Cognitive Performance. European Psychologist.
Dror, I. E., Peron, A., & Hind, S.-L. (2005). When Emotions Get the Better of Us: The Effect of Contextual Top-down Processing on Matching Fingerprints. APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY. Web.