(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.1130 When Emotions Get the Better of Us: The Effect of Contextual Top-down Processing on Matching Fingerprints

Twenty-seven participants made a total of 2,484 judgments whether a pair of fingerprints matched or not. A quarter of the trials acted as a control condition. The rest of the trials included top-down influences aimed at biasing the participants to find a match. These manipulations included emotional background stories of crimes and explicitly disturbing photographs from crime scenes, as well as subliminal messages. The data revealed that participants were affected by the top-down manipula-tions and as a result were more likely to make match judgments. However, the increased likelihood of making match judgments was limited to ambiguous fingerprints. The top-down manipulations were not able to contradict clear non-matching fingerprints. Hence, such contextual information actively biases the ways gaps are filled, but was not sufficient to override clear bottom-u