With a few notable exceptions, the research on interrogation, suspect interviewing, and intelligence collection has been predominantly focused on either broad categories of their methods (e.g., information gathering vs. accusatorial models) or very specific techniques (e.g., using open-ended questions, appealing to the source's conscience). The broad categories, however, are not meaningful enough to fully describe the dynamic between interrogator and subject, whereas the specific techniques may be too detailed to understand and research the process of interrogation. To remedy this and advance the academic and operational fields, we identified 71 unique techniques and sorted them into six domains: Rapport and Relationship Building, Context Manipulation, Emotion Provocation, Collaboration, Confrontation/Competition, and Presentation of Evidence. The resulting three-level structure consisting of broad categories, the six domains, and specific techniques form a taxonomy of interrogation methods. In addition, we propose a testable model of how the domains may interact in the process of interrogation. The taxonomy and theoretical model offer heuristic devices for both researchers and practitioners searching for a parsimonious and more meaningful way to describe, research, and understand the interviewing and interrogation of those accused of wrong-doing or possessing guilty knowledge.

Building on a substantial body of literature examining interrogation methods employed by police investigators and their relationship to suspect behaviors, we analyzed a sample of audio and video interrogation recordings of individuals suspected of serious violent crimes. Existing survey research has focused on the tactics reportedly used, at what rate, and under what conditions; observational studies detail which methods are actually employed. With a few notable exceptions, these foundational studies were static examinations of interrogation methods that documented the absence or presence of various approaches. In the present study, we cast interrogation as a dynamic phenomenon and code the recordings in 5-min intervals to examine how interrogation methods and suspect cooperation change over time. Employing the interrogation taxonomy framework, particularly 4 discrete domains-rapport and relationship building, emotion provocation, presentation of evidence, and confrontation/competition-we found that the emphasis of the domains varied across interrogations and were significantly different when suspects confessed versus when they denied involvement. In regression models, suspect cooperation was positively influenced by the rapport and relationship building domain, though it was negatively impacted by presentation of evidence and confrontation/competition. Moreover, we found that the negative effects of confrontation/competition on suspect cooperation lasted for up to 15 min. The implications of the findings for practice and future research include the benefits of a rapport-based approach, the deleterious effects of accusatorial methods, and the importance of studying when, not just if, certain interrogation techniques are employed. (PsycINFO Database Record

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) provides online information resources for biology, including the GenBank® nucleic acid sequence database and the PubMed® database of citations and abstracts published in life science journals. NCBI provides search and retrieval operations for most of these data from 35 distinct databases. The E-utilities serve as the programming interface for most of these databases. New resources include the Comparative Genome Resource (CGR) and the BLAST ClusteredNR database. Resources receiving significant updates in the past year include PubMed, PMC, Bookshelf, IgBLAST, GDV, RefSeq, NCBI Virus, GenBank type assemblies, iCn3D, ClinVar, GTR, dbGaP, ALFA, ClinicalTrials.gov, Pathogen Detection, antimicrobial resistance resources, and PubChem. These resources can be accessed through the NCBI home page at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

A great deal of research in the past two decades has been devoted to interrogation and interviewing techniques. This study contributes to the existing literature using an online survey to examine the frequency of use and perceived effectiveness of interrogation methods for up to 152 military and federal-level interrogators from the USA. We focus on the who (objective and subjective interrogator characteristics), the what (situational and detainee characteristics), and the why (intended goal of interrogation). Results indicate that rapport and relationship-building techniques were employed most often and perceived as the most effective regardless of context and intended outcome, particularly in comparison to confrontational techniques. In addition, context was found to be important in that depending on the situational and detainee characteristics and goal, interrogation methods were viewed as more or less effective.

The past two decades of research on interrogation were spurred, in large part, by the specter of false confessions and the resulting miscarriages of justice. More recently, interest in the topic has been fueled by the need to develop evidence-based methods that improve the collection of diagnostic confession evidence and accurate intelligence from human sources. In this review, we update the research on false confessions and describe recent assessments of scientifically validated approaches for obtaining cooperation, eliciting confessions, and detecting deceit. Studies are summarized through the prism of accusatorial versus information-gathering approaches to interrogation: The former rely on psychological manipulation and control-based methods, whereas the latter focus on developing rapport and cooperation to elicit an account that can be strategically addressed via evidence presentation. The review concludes with recommendations for additional research to further improve the effectiveness of interrogations across a variety of contexts.

The current study sought to examine the 6 domains conceptualized in a recent taxonomy of interrogation methods (Kelly, Miller, Redlich, & Kleinman, 2013): rapport and relationship building, context manipulation, emotion provocation, confrontation/competition, collaboration, and presentation of evidence. In this article, the domains are first situated in the existing literature that has similarly examined a limited number of constructs used to describe and explain interrogation methods, and the analyses aimed to lend empirical support to what were previously only conceptual constructs. Using data from both a survey of interrogators and investigative interviewers and a content analysis of actual recorded interrogations, we examined reported and actual rates of use of the domains, the relationship of the domains to one another, and their association with suspect confession or denials. We found that the domains were reportedly used at significantly different rates, with rapport and relationship building being the most used domain and confrontation/competition the least. We found significant, positive associations between confrontation/competition, emotion provocation, and presentation of evidence in both sources of data, and these 3 domains were also significantly more likely to be used where the suspect denied involvement. The implications of the study are that the domains are meaningful, independent constructs that can be used in future research to describe and explain interrogation.

An unknown virus was isolated from a lung biopsy sample and multiple other samples from a patient who developed a lethal case of pneumonia following a peripheral blood stem cell transplant. A random PCR-based molecular screening method was used to identify the infectious agent as avian paramyxovirus 1 (APMV-1; a group encompassing Newcastle disease virus), which is a highly contagious poultry pathogen that has only rarely been found in human infections. Immunohistochemical analysis confirmed the presence of APMV-1 antigen in sloughed alveolar cells in lung tissue from autopsy. Sequence from the human isolate showed that it was most closely related to virulent pigeon strains of APMV-1. This is the most completely documented case of a systemic human infection caused by APMV-1 and is the first report of an association between this virus and a fatal disease in a human.

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