Christian Meissner is Professor of Psychology & Criminal Justice at the University of Texas at El Paso and Director of the Center for Law & Human Behavior. He is also currently serving as Associate Vice President for Research, where he coordinates research proposals and centers in the areas of behavioral science and national security. He holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive & Behavioral Science from Florida State University (2001) and conducts empirical studies on the psychological processes underlying investigative interviews, including issues surrounding eyewitness recall and identification, deception detection, and interrogations and confessions. He has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He has served on advisory panels for the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and currently serves on the editorial board of several prominent academic journals, including Applied Cognitive Psychology, Journal of Applied Research in Memory & Cognition, Law & Human Behavior, and Legal & Criminological Psychology. From 2010-2012, he served as Program Director of Law & Social Sciences at the National Science Foundation. In 2008, Dr. Meissner received the Saleem Shah Award for "Early Career Excellence in Psychology and Law" from the American Psychology-Law Society and the American Academy of Forensic Psychology. In 2011, Drs. Meissner and Lassiter were awarded the American Psychology-Law Society Book Award and the American Publisher's PROSE Award for "Professional and Scholarly Excellence in Psychology" for their edited volume, "Police Interrogations and False Confessions: Current Research, Practice, and Policy Recommendations".
Interrogations & Confessions
Minimization and maximization techniques: Assessing the perceived consequences of confessing and confession diagnosticity (with Allyson J. Horgan, Melissa B. Russano, and Jacqueline R. Evans), Psychology, Crime, & Law (2011)
Identifying interrogation strategies that minimize the likelihood of obtaining false information, without compromising the ability...
Modeling the influence of investigator bias on the elicitation of true and false confessions (with Fadia M. Narchet and Melissa B. Russano), Law & Human Behavior (2011)
The aim of this study was to model various social and cognitive processes believed to...
Criminal versus HUMINT interrogations: The importance of psychological science to improving interrogative practice. (with Jacqueline R. Evans, Susan E. Brandon, Melissa B. Russano, and Steven M. Kleinman), Journal of Psychiatry & Law (2010)
The discovery of many cases of wrongful conviction in the criminal justice system involving admissions...
Police interrogations and false confessions: Current research, practice, and policy recommendations (with G. Daniel Lassiter) (2010)
The importance of a laboratory science for improving the diagnostic value of confession evidence (with Melissa B. Russano and Fadia M. Narchet), Interrogations and confessions: Current research, practice, and policy recommendations (2010)
Deception Detection
Can intuition improve deception detection performance? (with Justin S. Albrechtsen and Kyle J. Susa), Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2009)
Two studies examined the role of processing style (intuitive vs. deliberative processing) in a deception...
“I’d know a false confession if I saw one”: A comparative study of college students and police investigators (with Saul M. Kassin and Rebecca J. Norwick), Law & Human Behavior (2005)
College students and police investigators watched or listened to ten prison inmates confessing to crimes....
You’re guilty, so just confess!: Cognitive and behavioral confirmation biases in the interrogation room (with Saul M. Kassin), In D. Lassiter’s (Ed.), Interrogations, confessions, and entrapment. (pp. 85-106). Kluwer Academic / Plenum Press (2004)
He’s guilty!: Investigator bias in judgments of truth and deception (with Saul M. Kassin), Law & Human Behavior (2002)
Detecting deception is an inherently difficult task, but one that plays a critical role for...
Description-Identification Relationship
The Cognitive Interview: A meta-analytic review and study space analysis of the past 25 years (with Amina Memon and Joanne Fraser), Psychology, Public Policy, & Law (2010)
The Cognitive Interview (CI) is a well-established protocol for interviewing witnesses. The current article presents...
Accuracy of eyewitness descriptions (with Kyle J. Susa), Encyclopedia of Psychology & Law (2008)
A theoretical and meta-analytic review of the relationship between verbal descriptions and identification accuracy in memory for faces (with Siegfried L. Sporer and Kyle J. Susa), European Journal of Cognitive Psychology (2008)
Verbal descriptions can sometimes impair (or “overshadow”) and other times facilitate subsequent attempts at perceptual...
Person descriptions as eyewitness evidence (with Siegfried L. Sporer and Jonathan W. Schooler), In R. Lindsay, D. Ross, J. Read, & M. Toglia, (Eds), Handbook of Eyewitness Psychology: Memory for People (pp. 3-34). Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates. (2007)
Applied aspects of the instructional bias effect in verbal overshadowing, Applied Cognitive Psychology (2002)
Previous studies have demonstrated that instructional manipulation of a participant witness’s response criterion on a...
Eyewitness Identification
The need for expert psychological testimony on eyewitness identification (with Roy S. Malpass, Stephen J. Ross, and Jessica L. Marcon), Expert testimony on the psychology of eyewitness identification (2009)
A “middle road” approach to bridging the basic-applied divide in eyewitness identification research (with Sean M. Lane), Applied Cognitive Psychology (2008)
Over a century of laboratory research has explored the mechanisms of memory using a variety...
Basic and applied issues in eyewitness research: A Münsterberg centennial retrospective (with Brian H. Bornstein) (2008)
Training of eyewitnesses (with Roy S. Malpass and Kyle J. Susa), Encyclopedia of Psychology & Law (2008)
The phenomenology of carryover effects between showup and lineup identification (with Ryann M. Haw and Jason J. Dickinson), Memory (2007)
This study explored carryover effects from showups to subsequent lineup identifications using a novel paradigm...
Cross-Race Effect
Modeling the role of social-cognitive processes in the recognition of own- and other-race faces (with Kyle J. Susa and Hendrik de Heer), Social Cognition (2010)
Known as the cross-race effect (CRE), psychological research has consistently shown that people are less...
Perceptual identification and the cross-race effect (with Jessica L. Marcon, Michael Frueh, Kyle J. Susa, and Otto H. MacLin), Visual Cognition (2010)
The current research examined whether the cross-race effect (CRE) was evident in perceptual identification tasks...
Assessing the influence of recollection and familiarity in memory for own- vs. other-race faces (with Jessica L. Marcon and Kyle J. Susa), Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (2009)
The current research examined the contributions of recollection vs. familiarity in memory for own- and...
Cross-racial lineup identification: The potential benefits of context reinstatement (with Jacqueline R. Evans and Jessica L. Marcon), Psychology, Crime, & Law (2009)
The current research examined the potential benefit of context reinstatement on the cross-race effect in...
Cross-race effect in eyewitness identification (with Jessica L. Marcon and Roy S. Malpass), Encyclopedia of Psychology & Law (2008)
Juror/Jury Decision-Making
The effects of accomplice witnesses and jailhouse informants on jury decision making (with Jeffrey S. Neuschatz, Deah S. Lawson, Jessica K. Swanner, and Joseph S. Neuschatz), Law & Human Behavior (2008)
The present study presents one of the first investigations of the effects of accomplice witnesses...
Racial bias in juror decision-making: A meta-analytic review of defendant treatment (with Tara L. Mitchell, Ryann M. Haw, and Jeffrey E. Pfeifer), Law & Human Behavior (2005)
Common wisdom seems to suggest that racial bias, defined as disparate treatment of minority defendants,...
Jury nullification: The influence of judicial instruction on the relationship between attitudes and juridic decision-making (with John C. Brigham and Jeffrey E. Pfeifer), Basic & Applied Social Psychology (2003)
Prior research on jury nullification has suggested that individuals tend to operate on their “sentiments”...
Memory (Basic & Applied)
Event memory and misinformation effects in a gorilla (with Bennett L. Schwartz, Megan Hoffman, Sian Evans, and Leslie D. Frazier), Animal Cognition (2004)
Event memory and misinformation effects were examined in an adult gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla). The...
Towards a model of false recall: Experimental manipulation of encoding context and the collection of verbal reports (with Kerri A. Goodwin and K. Anders Ericsson), Memory & Cognition (2001)
The likelihood of false recall in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm was shown to depend on...