Will the introduction of an emotional context affect fingerprint analysis and decision-making?

Fingerprint identification relies on an expert's ability to accurately recognise differences and similarities in friction ridge detail. The process is open to the questioning of an expert's ability to accurately analyse and interpret friction ridges. It has been suggested that the interpretation and analysis of fingermarks becomes more subjective as clarity decreases and as a consequence the expert is more vulnerable to external stimuli. An experiment involving 70 fingerprint experts was conducted to establish whether the introduction of an emotional context would alter the experts' judgement of an ambiguous or poor quality mark. The emotional context did have a perceived effect on the experts' analysis, as more stated they were affected by the information they were given. However, it did not have any actual effect on their final opinions as no difference was observed between the high- and low-emotional contexts.     

Progressive Reform and the Decline of Democratic Accountability: The Popular Election of State Supreme Court Judges, 1850-1920

This essay probes the relationship among different kinds of political cultures, the conduct of judicial elections, and the extent of dissent on the state supreme courts of California, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas from 1850 to 1920. The introduction at the turn of the twentieth century of Progressive election reforms—most notably the secret ballot, the direct party primary, and the nonpartisan ballot—reduced levels of turnout in judicial contests and increased roll-off from major statewide political to judicial elections. These reforms made judicial elections the tail on the electoral kite and denied the public its best means of regulating judicial policy making. Yet these changes in the electorate's behavior were seemingly unrelated to variations in the rate of dissent in these four state courts, whose judges apparently viewed popular partisan election as more a potential than a real threat to their independence.     

The Discursive Demolition of the Asian Development Model

I demonstrate the constitutive effects of discursive strategies and explore the discursive conditions in which changing ideas generate these effects. I perform an extensive analysis of the discursive strategies generated by three key actors in the Asian financial crisis. I argue that all three, U.S. Treasury, the International Monetary Fund, and the Kim Dae-jung South Korean administration, represented key practices associated with the Asian model as "cronyism" and as "corruption," thereby normatively delegitimating these practices, thereby effecting the demise of the Asian model of development in Korea. I argue that these discursive practices generate narrative structures that have a constitutive effect on the subsequent discursive and economic practices of actors. The manner in which the narratives represent "causes" of the crisis constitute and reconstitute the social meanings by which past and current social and economic practices are legitimated or de-legitimated. The structures constituted by these social meanings re-create and reconstitute the present and future conditions for strategic action. I conclude with a demonstration of how these narratives institutionalize the discourses they construct through changes in Korean state and commercial institutions.