Interpersonal Threat Detection
If you would like to discuss any of these projects in further detail, or are interested in connecting and / or collaborating, please get in contact!
My postgraduate (MSc Psychological Research, Bangor University) thesis explored interpersonal threat detection. I undertook this study under the supervision of Dr. Paloma Marí-Beffa. I will continue with this research as I complete my PhD under the continued supervision of Paloma and also Dr. Lara Maister.
Current Studies:
Two linked studies are currently awaiting ethical approval. Check back later for more information and study links. For previous publications, see below.
Publications
Check back later! Publications will be made available soon!
Conferences
I was fortunate to have the PhD research approved and funded by an ESRC DTC studentship. We have also been extremely lucky to receive the support of the amazing North Wales Police and the Criminology department at Bangor University.
Interpersonal violence can be referred to a pattern of behaviour used to establish control and power over another person through fear and intimidation, often including threat or use of violence. There has been recent social alarm about the increase in recorded cases of interpersonal violence. Our aim is to predict (and therefore prevent) an aggression by analysing how those with experience perceive these situations. We will study interpersonal visual cues in the context of broad variables used in violence prevention, such as those highlighted in recent government reports. One of the issues in the reports is that 80% of the knife crime cases are avoidable, many resulting from over-reacting to threat cues. So therefore, detecting how those with experience analyse these situations will help improve threat perception, reduce over-reaction and provide the triggers for non-violent reactions.
An evidence-based approach will be adopted to study expert performance typically taking in three research stages but this study will on the two stages below:
1) Capturing the essence of experience using a trigger task. We will use videos of interpersonal violence that may or may not result in aggression. Each video will be split in different time frames for participants to guess whether such situation will result in an attack or not. During early frames accuracy should be at chance (no awareness). As each video progresses, judgements should become more accurate achieving 100% towards the end (full awareness). Participants will include security officers (police and prison officers), combat martial artists, and inexperienced members of the public of different ages. We predict that those with experience manifest in earlier awareness thresholds compared to non-experts.
2) Identify Underlying Mechanisms. We will use eye trackers to analyse the time taken to process scenes during critical frames. The quantitative isolation of these cues combined with the qualitative information collected during structured interviews will help understanding how expertise is used.
Future research will evaluate how this expertise can be transferred to naïve agents.
More details coming soon!