Police tend to use techniques to increase the chance that suspects will be prosecuted and convicted. Police use techniques like criminal profiling, unaided judgments of deception, the polygraph test, brain-based techniques for guaging deception and procedures to induce confessions

Profiling is an attempt to use what is known about the case to infer who may have committed it. Profiling is not necessarily accurate but typically leads to a decent estimated guess as to the individuals who may have committed the crime

People tend to use cues like fidgeting and vision deflection as signs of lying but these are typically not accurate. Various verbal cues and body signs associated with verbal cues are typically more accurate in determining deception

No measure of physiological reactions can precisely distinguish between guilt and other emotions. Examiners claim high rates of accurate but these rates are often very flucuating and tend to differ between examiners. Other problems also arise in their use

Two techniques, brain scans and MRIs, measure brain activity in various areas to determine when someone is lying or telling the truth. Their validity under real-life questioning has yet to be determined

Guilty suspects will often claim innocence but sometimes innocent suspects will falsely proclaims their guilt because of perceived pressure from the authorities. Various factors like prolonged social isolation and fabricating evidence could lead to false confessions

The recording of interrogations is often pointed to as the most effective way to prevent negative interrogation practices as it could lead to reforms in the way that suspects are questioned while in police custody

Behavioral confirmation is a situation in which people's expectations causes them to act in ways that confirm those expectations

Brain fingerprinting is a procedure that involves the measurement of brainwaves in response to a stimulus to assess whether the brain recognizes that stimulus

Cognitive load interviews are interviews that are designed to mentally tax a person due to high cognitive demand. In such interviews it becomes difficult to simultaneously answer a question and maintain a lie

Compliant false confessions are when the suspect is induced to comply with the interrogator's demands to make an incriminating statement

A control question test is a polygraph technique in which the subject is asked a question that elicits an emotional response

Countermeasures are techniques employed by a deceptive subject to "beat" the polygraph test in order to avoid detection

Criminal profiling is the use of psychological principles as a crime investigation technique to guide police toward suspects who pssess certain personal characteristics as revealed by the way a crime was committed

Diagnostic cues are cues that enable professionals to accurately diagnose or distinguish among available alternatives (such as psychopaths and non-psychopaths)

Fabricated evidence is false or made-up evidence presented by interrogators in order to elicit information from suspects

A false confession is an admission of guilt to a crime in which the confessor is not culpable. False confessions occur for different reasons and they can be explained by different situational and dispositional factors

fMRI is a type of specialized neuroimaging that registers blood flow related to neutal activity in the brain or spinal chord

The fundamental attribution error is the belief that behavior is caused by stable factors internal to a person rather than by situational factors external to that person

The Guilty Knowledge test is a polygraph technique in which the subject is asked a series of questions whose answers would only be known by the perpetrator

Illusory causation is the belief in a causal relationship where none exists or the false impression that two variables are causally related

Internalized false confessions can result when, after hours of being questioned, badgered and told stories about what "must have happened", the suspect begins to develop a profound distrust of his own memory

A mass murderer is a person who kills four or more victims in one location during a period of time that lasts anywhere from a few minutes to several hours

Negative incentives are tactics (such as accusations and evidence fabrication that interrogators use to convey that the suspect has no choice but to confess

A polygraph is an instrument for recording variations in several physiological functions that may indicate whether a person is telling the truth or lying

Positive inducements are tactics used by interrogators to motivate suspects to see that an admission of guilt is in their best interest. All interrogators try, implicitly or explicitly, to send the messagethat the suspect will receive some benefit in exchange for their admission of wrongdoing

Serial killers are people who kill four or more victims on separate occasions, usually in different locations

Spree killers are people who kills victims at two or more different locations with no "cooling-off" interval between murders

Truth bias occurs because people are naturally better at detecting truthful denials than accurately judging deceptive elaborations. Therefore, people tend to assume that most assertations are honest unless their authenticity is called into question

Voluntary flase confessions are false confessions that arise because people seek notoriety, desire to cleanse themselves of guilty feelings from previous wrongdoings, want to protect the real criminal or have difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction