
Yueran YangUniversity of Nevada, Reno | UNR · Department of Psychology
Yueran Yang
Doctor of Philosophy
About
46
Publications
17,470
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
605
Citations
Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
August 2016 - present
Education
August 2010 - July 2016
Publications
Publications (46)
This research analyzed data from the Youth Asset Study (YAS), a 4-year longitudinal investigation designed to examine the prospective influence of youth assets, which are believed to influence behavior at the individual, family, and community levels, on youth risk behaviors. The purpose was to determine if specific youth assets (e.g., responsible c...
This article presents key findings from a research project that evaluated the validity and probative value of cartridge-case comparisons under field-based conditions. Decisions provided by 228 trained firearm examiners across the US showed that forensic cartridge-case comparison is characterized by low error rates. However, inconclusive decisions c...
Objective:
False confessions are prevalent in wrongful convictions, and much research has examined investigation factors and interrogation methods that can contribute to false confessions. However, not all these factors are under the control of the legal system, and improving the effectiveness of interrogation methods has a limited effect on evalu...
Background
The purpose of this study was to assess the protective influence of individual, family, and community assets from the initiation of sexual intercourse (ISI) for adolescents living in one-parent households compared with adolescents living in two-parent households.
Methods
Five waves of data were collected annually over a 4-year period (...
How should humans and machines improve classification performance? Past use of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis has focused on improving classification performance by improving a classifier’s accuracy, which is indicated by the area under the classifier’s ROC curve. This article, however, shows that ROC analysis inherently relates t...
False confessions are a prevalent factor in wrongful convictions, and much research has examined investigation factors and interrogation methods that can contribute to false confessions. However, not all these factors are under the control of the legal system, and improving the effectiveness of interrogation methods has a limited effect on evaluati...
A police lineup is a procedure in which a suspect is surrounded by known-innocent persons (fillers) and presented to the witness for an identification attempt. The purpose of a lineup is to test the investigator’s hypothesis that the suspect is the culprit, and the investigator uses the witness’ identification decision and the associated confidence...
BACKGROUND
The purpose of this study was to examine the prospective associations between 17 individual, family, and community level youth assets and truancy among adolescents living in 1-parent and 2-parent households.
METHODS
Five waves of data were collected annually over a 4-year period from a racially/ethnically diverse sample of adolescents (...
Mindful awareness (MA) and distress tolerance are emerging as robust predictors of mental health in populations with high levels of stress and trauma exposure, such as first responders. The combination of both protective factors may have potentiating benefits for mental health. First responders might especially benefit from high levels of MA if the...
Objectives:
We assessed recent policy recommendations to collect eyewitnesses' confidence statements in witnesses' own words as opposed to numerically. We conducted an experiment to test whether eyewitnesses' free-report verbal confidence statements are as diagnostic of eyewitness accuracy as their numeric confidence statements and whether the dia...
Objectives: In this study, we aimed to investigate possible racial/ethnic differences regarding service utilization, linkage to care, and medication adherence among people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). Methods: PLWHA (N = 142) 18 years or older were recruited from a needs assessment project conducted in Nevada in 2016. Participants completed a self...
Background: Service utilization and service needs are key components of HIV care now that people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) have a longer life expectancy and therefore develop more chronic diseases and related conditions. The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to investigate associations among PLWHA's service utilization, unmet service nee...
A police lineup is a procedure in which a suspect is surrounded by known-innocent persons (fillers) and presented to the witness for an identification attempt. The purpose of a lineup is to test the investigator’s hypothesis that the suspect is the culprit, and the investigator uses the witness’ identification decision and the associated confidence...
Despite extensive research summarizing the causes of wrongful convictions, there is no summary of the literature on factors that influence exonerees’ reintegration into society. Given the growing number of exonerees, it is important to examine factors that influence their successful reintegration into society. This book chapter first discusses orga...
The extant literature has illustrated that protective service workers experience negative repercussions associated with their job (including the development of secondary traumatic stress; STS) and may utilize maladaptive coping mechanisms. Developing an improved understanding of factors that might explain the relationship between STS and the utiliz...
Background
Comorbidity rates and service needs are high among people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). The effects of service utilization and unmet service needs on antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence are not well understood. The purpose of this study was to investigate associations among PLWHA’s service utilization, unmet service needs, and ART adh...
The conceptual frameworks provided by both the lineups-as-experiments analogy and Signal Detection Theory have proven important to furthering understanding of performance on eyewitness identification-procedures. The lineups-as-experiments analogy proposes that when investigators carry out a lineup procedure, they are acting as experimenters, and sh...
Research has shown that adolescents in military families have higher rates of suicidal behaviors compared to their nonmilitary peers. This is typically attributed to military-specific stressors, but exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) may also play a role. Our primary research objective was to determine whether cumulative exposure to A...
This article proposes an effect taxonomy to organize and categorize the interrogation techniques that police often use to elicit confessions from suspects during custodial interrogations. The effect taxonomy categorizes techniques into one of four categories according to how interrogation techniques differently influence guilty and innocent suspect...
Objectives: In this study, we aimed to investigate possible racial/ethnic differences regarding service utilization, linkage to care, and medication adherence among people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). Methods: PLWHA (N = 142) 18 years or older were recruited from a needs assessment project conducted in Nevada in 2016. Participants completed a self...
Objective:
In custodial interrogations, suspects tend to give disproportionate weight to immediate outcomes relative to future outcomes when deciding whether to confess or deny guilt. The current research examined whether the perceived (un)certainty of an immediate outcome influences suspects' short-sighted confession decisions.
Hypotheses:
We h...
The conceptual frameworks provided by both the lineups-as-experiments analogy and Signal Detection Theory have proven important to furthering understanding of performance on eyewitness identification-procedures. The lineups-as-experiments analogy proposes that when investigators carry out a lineup procedure, they are acting as experimenters, and sh...
This research tested whether the perception of threat during a police interrogation mobilizes suspects to cope with interrogation demands and bolsters their resistance to self-incrimination pressures. Experimental procedures led university undergraduates (N = 296) to engage in misconduct or not, thereby making them guilty or innocent. An experiment...
This article presents an expected cost model for evaluating and comparing the performance of eyewitness identification procedures. The model estimates the expected cost of an identification procedure in order to quantify how well the procedure helps the police achieve the investigation goal of identifying and incriminating the culprit. We first app...
Intrinsic (e.g. genetic) and/or extrinsic (e.g. disease, environment, quality of life) factors produce population differences in skeletal growth and/or developmental indicators, which are used to study subadults in biological anthropology. This comparative study on growth and development variability aims to evaluate the extent of these divergences...
Dental development is consistently stated to be under stronger genetic control and less influenced by the environment than skeletal development. However, researchers have been recognizing population variation in dental formation for years, suggesting there is plasticity in development, which could therefore be impacted by some extrinsic or intrinsi...
After attending this presentation, attendees will understand the effects of genetic and environmental factors on skeletal and dental growth and development patterns and if they can affect resulting age estimates. These findings will impact the forensic science community by participating in the debate on global versus population-specific methods for...
Purpose
The study’s purpose was to improve the psychometric properties of the Youth Asset Survey (YAS).
Design
Longitudinal cohort study with youth and parents recruited via door-to-door canvassing to participate in a 5-wave, 4-year study that assessed prospective associations among youth assets and youth health-related behaviors. Additional test...
Secondary traumatic stress (STS) is a pattern of psychological symptoms that approximates the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and occurs in professionals who are exposed to individuals who have experienced trauma. While victim advocates are frontline health professionals who are trained to support victims of crime and interpersonal...
We conducted two experiments to test whether police interrogation elicits a biphasic process of resistance from suspects. According to this process, the initial threat of police interrogation mobilizes suspects to resist interrogative influence in a manner akin to a fight or flight response, but suspects’ protracted self-regulation of their behavio...
This article presents a new model of confessions referred to as the interrogation decision-making model. This model provides a theoretical umbrella with which to understand and analyze suspects’ decisions to deny or confess guilt in the context of a custodial interrogation. The model draws upon expected utility theory to propose a mathematical acco...
This research provided the first empirical test of the hypothesis that stereotypes bias evaluations of forensic evidence. A pilot study (N = 107) assessed the content and consensus of 20 criminal stereotypes by identifying perpetrator characteristics (e.g., sex, race, age, religion) that are stereotypically associated with specific crimes. In the m...
We provide a novel Bayesian treatment of the eyewitness identification problem as it relates to various system variables, such as instruction effects, lineup presentation format, lineup-filler similarity, lineup administrator influence, and show-ups versus lineups. We describe why eyewitness identification is a natural Bayesian problem and how nume...
Suspects have a propensity to focus on short-term contingencies, giving disproportionate weight to the proximal consequences that are delivered by police during an interrogation, and too little consideration to the distal (and often more severe) consequences that may be levied by the judicial system if they are convicted. In this research, the auth...
Innocent suspects may not adequately protect themselves during interrogation because they fail to fully appreciate the danger of the situation. This experiment tested whether innocent suspects experience less stress during interrogation than guilty suspects, and whether refusing to confess expends physiologic resources. After experimentally manipul...
Suspects have a preexisting vulnerability to make short-sighted confession decisions, giving disproportionate weight to proximal, rather than distal, consequences. The findings of the current research provided evidence that this preexisting vulnerability is exacerbated by factors that are associated with the immediate interrogation situation. In Ex...