Neuroscientists have tried to observe incremental changes to brain structure and function following novel motor skill learning. Observable increases in structural gray matter (i.e., neural cell bodies and synaptic connections between them) are evident as early as 1 or 2 weeks of daily practice, and decaying 2–4 months once training has stopped (Driemeyer et al., 2008). However, functional neuroimaging research suggests learninginduced plasticity or reorganization of synaptic connections in the brain as early as the very first training session. Karni et al. (1995) identified a switch between initial "fast learning" and consolidated "slow learning" that corresponds with improvements in performance speed and accuracy and less variability across movement trials (Shmuelof et al., 2012). Further, M1 activity increased over several weeks of daily practice and was maintained for up to 5 months with no additional training (Karni et al., 1995). Cross et al. (2009) conducted a neuroimaging study comparing physical and observational training of brief dance sequences among non-experts. After only 5 days of training, they found common gains in activation of premotor and inferior parietal MNN regions (**Figure 1**) but better performance and significant M1 activation for physically versus visually trained dance sequences (Cross et al., 2009).

Lending empirical evidence to the principle of "use it or lose it," these findings show fast initial training gains that decay relatively quickly once training ends. Although they did not measure neurological indexes of motor learning, Andersen et al. (2018) investigated skill decay following a 4-day iPREP training program. Officers' gains in performance (reduction of lethal force errors) and autonomic stress regulation (decreased maximum HR and faster recovery to resting HR) were maintained up to 12-month post-training, returning to pre-training levels at 18-month follow-up. Together with the neuroscientific evidence presented here, these findings underscore the importance of continued practice and regular refresher training to maintain learning-induced changes to performance, brain structure, and function.

### Organizational Challenges

#### Leveraging Finite Training Resources: Funding and Qualified Personnel

Before adopting evidence-based training approaches, individual police agencies must leverage finite available resources, including time away from regular duties, funding, and qualified personnel. Scenario-based training is especially resource-intensive and educationally challenging, despite demonstrated efficacy. Many unique and relevant scenarios need to be developed and executed with a high degree of realism to preserve the value of the teaching opportunity. However, evidence-based training may facilitate cost savings in the long run. In an evaluation commissioned by the United States Department of Education of 77 educational interventions that were not evidence-based, 91% were found to have weak or no positive effects (Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, 2014). The United States military also implemented a \$125 million dollar program (Comprehensive Soldier Fitness) to enhance resilience and performance before evaluating its efficacy, which was found to have no objective improvements and at worst may actually cause harm (McCord, 2003; Eidelson et al., 2011). Krameddine et al. (2013) performed a cost-benefit analysis of their scenario-based mental health training program and found that savings incurred from a significant reduction in time spent on mental health calls exceeded the cost of the study and training program. These outcomes are especially significant given a higher incidence of subsequent mental health calls, further underscoring the compelling nature of an evidence-based approach to police training.

In addition to training content and method of delivery, trainers' skills, abilities, and approach are very important from both educational (i.e., during training) and professional (i.e., during regular police work) perspectives (Murphy, 2014), yet no standards or definitions exist for proficient trainers. Novel pedagogical approaches in policing have been explored, including an emphasis on group discussion and active debate (Birzer, 2003) and the development of "train the trainer" programs (Hammerness et al., 2005, 2007; Darling-Hammond and Bransford, 2007). Qualified trainers are often "those that do" and may not have formal pedagogical training to identify or address the unique learning needs of their trainees. To address this gap in occupational training, Finland's PUC has introduced a 6-week teaching course specifically designed for use of force trainers. In addition to subject knowledge, the course covers general pedagogy including recognizing and solving challenges of the training group. Other learning outcomes include independently organizing a training event and training key issues related to the selection and use of force in a pragmatic and fundamental manner. In addition to a lack of empirical data on police training outcomes, there is a scarcity of research or data on teaching effectiveness. This has led to the definition of training objectives and quality criteria according to available resources over practical consideration of the skills intended for training. Therefore, the systematic evaluation and development of police pedagogy is limited and vulnerable to approaches that are not evidence-based, compromising the learning opportunity for trainees.

#### Cultural Challenges and Access to Information

There are strong differences in opinion surrounding police training and practices more general among various stakeholders, including policy makers, police supervisors, trainers, management, officers, as well as the public. Due to the sensitive nature of training content (i.e., specific tactical plans and maneuvers that involve lethal force), information is often kept secret from the public to maintain safety. However, the confidential nature of police training practices can also foster a culture of unwillingness to share ideas among stakeholders and creates an additional barrier to collecting and comparing useful information to promote best practices. Updating existing police training models is also met with a great deal of controversy, despite mounting empirical evidence for the benefits of various training approaches including problem-based learning (Makin, 2016) and a societal need for changes to various policing practices. However, newer motor learning models currently used in military training have adopted a more holistic approach and consider factors like environment, cognitive skills, and kinematic movement options on various continuums (Schmidt et al., 2019). The primary goal of effective training for stressful and unpredictable situations is to protect both public and police and should not be compromised due to extraneous factors (i.e., resources, personal, or political motivations).

Similarly, academic research is often inaccessible to police practitioners unless findings are published in open-access format at a significant financial cost to the researchers. This "silo effect" of information stunts knowledge exchange between sectors and is a barrier to disseminating useful research evidence to practical end-users. Despite containing very relevant insights for policing, scientific articles laden with jargon and fieldspecific terminology are often not translated into a language that is accessible or understandable to an applied audience or the general public. However, there are peer-reviewed journals and publications available that seek to combine academic and applied perspectives in policing, including *Police Practice and Research*, *Policing and Society*, and *Policing: An International Journal.* Evidence-based reports are also published in industryspecific periodicals such as *The Police Chief* and *The Blue Line*. Indeed, the purpose of this Special Edition of *Frontiers* is to disseminate relevant and timely knowledge across domains for the purpose of improving current practices in policing, identifying areas of future research and development, and saving time and resources by understanding what has already been done.

### RECOMMENDATIONS: BEST PRACTICES FOR EVIDENCE-BASED POLICE TRAINING

Common practice should not be confused with best practice or evidence-based practice. The following recommendations are based on the empirical and applied research evidence summarized in this review and are intended to promote training effectiveness as well as occupational safety.

### Training

such, complex motor, verbal, and cognitive skills including situational awareness, decision-making, and de-escalation should be trained in live environments with trained actors or instructors that can dynamically respond to officers' behaviors. Further empirical validation of virtual simulator systems relative to live scenario-based training is needed before police agencies make the considerable investment in implementing these methods for the use of force training. However, virtual technology can be useful as complimentary training tools (i.e., in addition to contextually relevant training settings) as well as for psychophysical performance screening similar to its application in athletics (section "Live Versus Virtual Scenario-Based Training").

#### Knowledge Dissemination

and be willing to accept evidence in favor of opinions fuelled by political, financial, or personal motives.

### CONCLUSIONS

An elite athlete such as a javelin thrower has one precise task to perform under a narrow range of controlled conditions. In police work, even a simple motor skill is never standardized or used in isolation. Officers have to constantly evaluate, consider, decide, and update what is appropriate or possible given the unfolding situation. As such, motor skills cannot be considered without all other aspects of police encounters, including occupationally relevant stress, situational awareness, and complex decision-making.

The current review is a synthesis of empirical and applied research on the fundamental principles of motor learning as relevant to police. Insights from the fields of applied policing, cognitive and computational neuroscience, and clinical and health psychology lend empirical evidence to the knowledge inherently possessed by police trainers, officers, and practitioners through their first-hand experience. Especially relevant to law enforcement, we consider the influence of occupationally relevant stress on the physiological and neurological mechanisms underlying police learning and performance. Training policies and protocols should be updated accordingly to reflect current knowledge and to promote motor learning and skill retention.

Bridging research across fields and industries also provides solutions to several systemic challenges to evidence-based policing, including a lack of universal training standards and knowledge exchange. Ultimately, we hope that this review will inspire practitioner engagement with applied research, and spark open and productive debate among various stakeholders on best practices surrounding training the complex motor skills required in policing.

## AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

PD and J-MH wrote the manuscript, conducted all background literature research to inform the contents, and approve the submitted version.

## FUNDING

Funding of this project was provided by a grant from the Government of Ontario Ministry of Labour (ROP 15-R-021).

## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to acknowledge the reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive suggestions, J. Houtsonen (Police University College, Finland) for early revisions of the manuscript, and E. Ropo (University of Tampere) for their supervisory counsel.

#### REFERENCES

Simon, H. A., and Chase, W. G. (1973). Skill in chess. *Am. Sci.* 61, 394–403.

Stanovich, K. E., and West, R. F. (2000). Individual differences in reasoning:

Implications for the rationality debate. *Behav. Brain Sci.* 23, 645–665.

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

*Copyright © 2019 Di Nota and Huhta. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.*

# Understanding Police Performance Under Stress: Insights From the Biopsychosocial Model of Challenge and Threat

#### *Donovan C. Kelley1 , Erika Siegel2 and Jolie B. Wormwood1 \**

*1 Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, United States, 2 Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States*

#### *Edited by:*

*Eamonn Patrick Arble, Eastern Michigan University, United States*

#### *Reviewed by:*

*Craig Bennell, Carleton University, Canada Edwina Light, University of Sydney, Australia*

#### *\*Correspondence:*

*Jolie B. Wormwood<EMAIL_ADDRESS><EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### *Specialty section:*

*This article was submitted to Health Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology*

*Received: 28 February 2019 Accepted: 19 July 2019 Published: 09 August 2019*

#### *Citation:*

*Kelley DC, Siegel E and Wormwood JB (2019) Understanding Police Performance Under Stress: Insights From the Biopsychosocial Model of Challenge and Threat. Front. Psychol. 10:1800. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01800*

We examine when and how police officers may avoid costly errors under stress by leveraging theoretical and empirical work on the biopsychosocial (BPS) model of challenge and threat. According to the BPS model, in motivated performance contexts (e.g., test taking, athletics), the evaluation of situational and task demands in relation to one's perceived resources available to cope with those demands engenders distinct patterns of peripheral physiological responding. Individuals experience more challenge-like states in which blood circulates more efficiently in the periphery when they evaluate their coping resources as meeting or exceeding the task demands. Conversely, individuals experience more threat-like states in which blood circulates less efficiently in the periphery when they view the situation or task demands as exceeding their coping resources. Patterns of response consistent with challenge and threat states have been shown to predict important performance and decision-making outcomes in stressful contexts, and repeated experiences of threat-like patterns of physiological activity are thought to have detrimental effects on long-term cardiovascular health. To date, however, research has not used the biopsychosocial model to understand police decision-making under stress. Here, we review relevant empirical work from the perspective of the BPS model concerning how minority status and power can shape challenge and threat responding and contribute to decision-making under stress. We then detail a research agenda aimed at improving the translational value of research being conducted within the BPS model for understanding complex performance and decision-making in the real world, including among law enforcement personnel.

#### Keywords: challenge, threat, biopsychosocial, police, shootings

Police work is often stressful and requires execution of difficult tasks where outcomes are of high consequence. In this paper, we propose that many situations involving police decisionmaking or performance can be understood as motivated performance contexts: the situations are goal-relevant, involve instrumental cognitive processing, have uncertain outcomes, and require active rather than passive responding (Blascovich and Mendes, 2000). Motivated performance contexts have been studied extensively in the health and social psychology literature using the biopsychosocial (BPS) model of challenge and threat (Blascovich and Tomaka, 1996; Blascovich, 2008a), which articulates the psychological and physiological mechanisms by which stress can sometimes lead to more optimal performance and decision-making (associated with greater challenge orientation) and sometimes lead to poorer performance and decision-making (associated with greater threat orientation; for a review, see Hase et al., 2019). Consistent with this theorizing, existing empirical data on police officers shows that greater physiological arousal in stressful situations is sometimes associated with improvements in performance and decisionmaking (e.g., Verhage et al., 2018; Arble et al., 2019) and sometimes with decrements (e.g., Andersen and Gustafsberg, 2016). The BPS model may offer novel insights into the mechanisms by which police performance and decision-making can be optimized even in the face of unavoidable physiological arousal or stress.

This article briefly introduces the BPS model of challenge and threat and reviews recent empirical work that may shed light on the different ways that stress can influence police performance [broadly defined as the ability to handle critical incidents, involving situational awareness, verbal/non-verbal communication, self-control, or control of the public, (e.g., Brimmell et al., 2018; Arble et al., 2019)] and decision-making [defined as critical judgments to engage or not engage in a target behavior, (e.g., Correll et al., 2007a; Verhage et al., 2018)] across varying contexts, for both better and worse. We conclude by describing a research agenda to enhance the translational value of BPS research to better understand, and ultimately intervene, to improve, complex performance and decisionmaking behavior in the real world.

## THE BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL MODEL OF CHALLENGE AND THREAT

According to the BPS model, challenge and threat represent motivational orientations involving the interplay of affective and cognitive processes that result from the evaluation of situational and task demands relative to one's available resources to cope with them (Blascovich and Mendes, 2000, 2010). More challenge-like states are experienced when a person evaluates his or her coping resources as meeting or exceeding the demands of the situation or task, while more threat-like states are experienced when a person evaluates the situation or task demands as exceeding his or her coping resources (Tomaka et al., 1993, 1997; Blascovich and Mendes, 2000, 2010). These appraisals (sometimes called evaluations) occur on a more subconscious and automatic level, are not under conscious control, and change dynamically over time as perceived demands or resources shift (see, Quigley et al., 2002; Seery, 2013). Originally, the factors contributing to the evaluation of task demands (e.g., perceptions of danger, uncertainty) were hypothesized as independent from those governing the evaluation of coping resources (e.g., dispositional factors, social support). However, more recent theorizing suggests that several factors are likely implicated in evaluations of both demands and resources (e.g., required effort, knowledge and skills, safety/ danger; see Blascovich, 2008b). This is consistent with the idea that challenge and threat are not fixed and dichotomous, but rather malleable states that exist as opposing endpoints of a continuum (Seery, 2013; Jamieson et al., 2016).

The BPS model's focus on appraisals of demands and resources developed out of Lazarus' theory of cognitive appraisal (see Lazarus and Folkman, 1984; Folkman and Lazarus, 1985; Lazarus, 1991), which has been utilized in the policing literature to explore the role of cognitive appraisals in stress and performance among law enforcement personnel (e.g., Larsson et al., 1988; Harris et al., 2017). Lazarus introduced the terms "challenge" and "threat" as part of his theory, emphasizing that stress was not a unitary construct, but a system of responses that could be altered by changing one's perception of a stressor (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984; Folkman and Lazarus, 1985). In Lazarus' theory, "challenge" and "threat" reflect valenced appraisals that contributed to perceptions of a situation's self-relevance and the potential for a situation to confer gains or losses, respectively (for review, see Jamieson et al., 2016). In the BPS model, challenge and threat responses *only* occur in self-relevant contexts and are associated with evaluations of the relative balance of demands and coping resources (Blascovich and Mendes, 2000, 2010). Critically, in the BPS model, unlike in Lazarus' theory, the patterns of cognitive appraisals associated with challenge and threat are posited to engender reliably distinct patterns of physiological arousal (e.g., Blascovich and Tomaka, 1996; Blascovich and Mendes, 2000).

The basis for using physiological responses as indicators of challenge and threat in the BPS model is derived from the work of Dienstbier (1989) who theorized that quickly mobilizing energy resources during motivated performance, *via* the sympathetic-adrenomedullary axis, or SAM (as opposed to slowly *via* hypothalamic pituitary axis, or HPA), was a marker of "physiological toughness" because it was associated with favorable outcomes like increased performance, more emotional stability, and lower anxiety, leaving individuals more likely to appraise situations positively (for review see, Seery, 2011). Both challenge and threat states are theorized to involve activation of the SAM axis, and thus are associated with increases in indices of cardiovascular arousal (e.g., increased heart rate) and sympathetic nervous system control of the heart (i.e., ventricular contractility, measured as the inverse of pre-ejection period, the time between the electrical stimulus initiating ventricular contraction and opening of the aortic valve). Increases in ventricular contractility and heart rate are frequently interpreted as indicators of task engagement in motivated performance contexts (Seery, 2011, 2013). Experiencing a more challenge-like orientation is also associated with increased cardiac output (CO; volume of blood circulated per minute) accompanied by decreased systemic vascular resistance, typically measured as total peripheral resistance (TPR), the extent of overall constriction in the peripheral vasculature (Dienstbier, 1989; Blascovich and Mendes, 2000). In more challenge-like states, the heart beats harder and faster and moves blood more efficiently to the periphery, benefiting organ function and motor activity. Threat-like states involve activation of the SAM axis and the HPA, which inhibits decreases in vasoconstriction in the periphery. Thus, experiencing a more threat-like orientation is associated with no change or even increases in vascular resistance combined with more modest increases in cardiac output and ventricular contractility (i.e., blood flow is unable to reach and circulate in the peripheral vasculature as efficiently). While challenge-like patterns of physiological responding are interpreted as beneficial for the body, threat-like patterns of physiological responding are considered detrimental to energy mobilization (Tomaka et al., 1993, 1997). Moreover, the pattern of cardiovascular reactivity associated with threat-like states is theorized to have deleterious impacts on long-term cardiovascular health if experienced repeatedly over time (Mendes et al., 2007a,b; Blascovich, 2008a; Major et al., 2013).

### RESEARCH USING THE BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL MODEL

Although the BPS model has yet to be directly explored in real-world police decision-making contexts, challenge and threat orientations have been shown to influence decision-making and performance in other stressful, high-stakes environments. For example, challenge orientation (physiological and psychological) has been associated with better performance in situations that unfold over longer durations of time such as surgery (Moore et al., 2014), cricket and baseball seasons (Blascovich et al., 2004; Turner et al., 2013, respectively), flight simulation (Vine et al., 2015), negotiations (O'Connor et al., 2010), and semester grades (e.g., Seery et al., 2010). However, greater challenge orientation also confers benefits in visual attention (e.g., Moore et al., 2012; Vine et al., 2016), motor performance (e.g., Moore et al., 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015), attentional control (e.g., Vine et al., 2013, 2015, 2016), and working memory (e.g., Kelsey et al., 1999; Elzinga and Roelofs, 2005; Feinberg and Aiello, 2010). As such, the BPS model may offer unique insight for improving police performance under stress both in situations that unfold over longer durations of time (e.g., assessing danger during a robbery; Arble et al., 2019) and in rapid decision-making contexts (e.g., lethal force decisions; Correll et al., 2007a).

Although a complete review of the BPS literature examining performance under stress is outside the scope of this article, we briefly highlight empirical findings in content areas that are particularly relevant to police decision-making and performance given the current sociopolitical context in the United States.

#### Stigmatization and Minority Status

Empirical studies with lay people have consistently demonstrated that, relative to White targets, participants are significantly quicker to shoot armed Black targets, significantly slower to "not shoot" unarmed Black targets, and have a lower shooting threshold for Black targets (i.e., tend to favor the "shoot" response) in computer-based shooting simulations (Correll et al., 2007a,b, 2011; Plant et al., 2011; Mekawi and Bresin, 2015). Laboratory research with real police officers on comparable tasks has demonstrated similar biases in reaction times for Black targets, though police officers generally demonstrate less bias in behavior and make fewer errors than lay individuals overall (see Correll et al., 2007a). Critically, research suggests these biases may be mitigated by a number of contextual and personal factors (for discussion, see Jetelina et al., 2017). For instance, police officers are less likely to demonstrate biases on shooting simulation tasks when they report having more positive interactions with Black people in their daily lives (Peruche and Plant, 2006) or report less overestimation of crime rates for minorities (Sadler et al., 2012), and studies with lay individuals have demonstrated reduced biases on tasks where counter-stereotypical targets (i.e., unarmed Black targets) are encountered more frequently (Correll et al., 2007b).

These findings on shooting simulation tasks are consistent with empirical work from the BPS model on challenge and threat responding during interactions with individuals from stigmatized groups. For example, Blascovich et al.'s (2001) "stigma-threat hypothesis," posited that effort exerted during interactions with individuals from stigmatized groups increases because non-stigmatized individuals monitor their behavior more carefully to appear unaffected and avoid accusations of prejudice (Blascovich et al., 2001; Derks et al., 2011). Even for individuals who do not hold blatant prejudices, interactions with individuals from stigmatized groups can evoke knowledge of negative stereotypes, resulting in increasing efforts to monitor behavior and suppress stereotype-consistent thoughts (Devine, 1989; Wyer et al., 2000). Indeed, researchers have consistently demonstrated that participants show patterns of cognitive appraisal and cardiovascular activity consistent with more threatened orientations during interactions with individuals from stigmatized groups (Blascovich et al., 2001; Mendes et al., 2002, 2007a). For instance, White participants performed worse on a joint word-finding task and were more likely to produce cardiovascular patterns associated with threat-like states (e.g., increased TPR) when interacting with Black confederates or confederates of low socioeconomic status compared to White confederates (Mendes et al., 2002).

However, researchers have found that increased interaction with stigmatized groups is positively related to challenge-like physiological responses during intergroup interactions (Blascovich et al., 2001). These findings parallel those from studies involving police officers (Peruche and Plant, 2006) and lay individuals (Correll et al., 2007a), where increased exposures to individuals from stigmatized groups, in safe contexts, reduced racial bias in shooting simulation tasks. This suggests that interventions targeted toward increasing positive social interactions with individuals from stigmatized or minority populations may help increase the likelihood of exhibiting more challenge-like orientations during intergroup interactions to the benefit of performance and decision-making.

#### Power

Research on the BPS model has examined the nuanced ways in which social status and power influence patterns of biopsychological activity. Specifically, individuals high in social status or power tend to experience more challenge-like states during social interactions with people of lower status (e.g., Scheepers and Ellemers, 2005; Scheepers, 2009; Scheepers et al., 2012). For example, participants prompted to recall incidents in their lives where they had a lot of power or who were randomly assigned to a high-power role (e.g., given more leverage in a negotiation task) exhibited more challenge-like appraisals and cardiovascular activity than participants randomly assigned to low-power comparison conditions (Scheepers et al., 2012). Consistently, Akinola and Mendes (2012) found that police officers who self-reported higher social status exhibited more approach-oriented or challenge-like patterns of physiological reactivity, including increased heart rate, cardiac output, and testosterone reactivity, during a simulated interaction with a disgruntled citizen.

Critically, research suggests that the relationship between power and biopsychological responding relies on the stability of the power hierarchy; those high in status show more threatlike responses when their status is perceived as unstable or illegitimate (Scheepers and Ellemers, 2005; Scheepers, 2009). These findings may offer insight into why tense situations can escalate quickly depending on social dynamics. Specifically, when police officers feel secure in their status as an authority figure and do not believe they are being undermined by a suspect or civilian, they may be more likely to engender challenge-like orientations to the benefit of decision-making and performance in that context. Moreover, research suggests that, when individuals' social identities are threatened, engaging in self-affirmation strategies engenders more challenge-like patterns of physiological reactivity (Derks et al., 2011). Thus, it may prove beneficial to develop interventions to help police officers maintain stable perceptions of their status (e.g., by engaging in self-affirmation strategies) even when interacting with suspects or other civilians who are questioning their legitimacy or status.

### THE BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL MODEL AND POLICE DECISION-MAKING: A RESEARCH AGENDA

Although the BPS model has proven useful in examining performance under stress across a variety of motivated performance contexts (see Behnke and Kaczmarek, 2018; Hase et al., 2019), there remains a critical need for translational research investigating its utility in real-world situations, specifically in the context of police interactions and decisionmaking. A recent field study demonstrated the viability of using the BPS model to examine and predict biopsychological responding among first responders, including police officers, in an ecologically valid, high-stress situation: a multi-faceted drill simulating the response to a plane making an emergency landing with a fire and injured passengers onboard (Wormwood, 2019). Consistent with the BPS model, more challenge-like appraisals among first responders were associated with better self-assessed performance during the drill (**Figure 1**).

Data from this field study highlight several critical theoretical and methodological considerations for researchers interested in pursuing translational research examining the relevance of the BPS model in realistic decision-making and performance scenarios. First, the vast majority of research using the BPS model has focused on group comparisons between samples of individuals exhibiting more threatened versus more challenged appraisals, failing to examine challenge and threat responses at the level of the individual (though see Quigley et al., 2002). As a result, little is known about why, given identical circumstances, one individual may be more challenged while another is more threatened (for review, see Kilby et al., 2018). Note the presence of robust individual differences observed in the recent field study, even within a highly evocative, personally-relevant context (**Figure 1**; Wormwood, 2019). According to Dienstbier (1989), exposure to repeated intermittent stressors could result in a proneness to challenge-like responding under stress, a pattern of response linked to both increased emotional stability and immune system enhancement (Seery, 2013). This is consistent with a number of clinical and therapeutic approaches (e.g., cognitive behavior therapy, desensitization therapy, stress inoculation training) which posit that trainings involving repeated exposure to small stressors that the individual can cope with successfully may bolster more effective, challengelike performance in the face of future, unknown stressors.

In addition, research using the BPS model has focused almost exclusively on static assessments of challenge and threat responding and has not examined how patterns of

FIGURE 1 | Stress/coping ratios predict self-assessed performance (rated on a 5-point scale) during an emergency training drill. Ratio of self-reported stress to self-reported coping ability is shown on the *x*-axis, with higher numbers indicating more threat-like appraisals and lower numbers indicating more challenge-like appraisals. An estimate of *R*<sup>2</sup> is provided in figure, though should be interpreted with caution due to sample size.

beats per minute for the same five participants throughout the study. Each row contains EDA and HR data for the same participant. For both physiological variables,

physiological activity or cognitive appraisals change dynamically over time as a stressful context unfolds. The recent field study revealed dynamic changes in physiological and SNS arousal over time throughout the training, and these patterns of change varied markedly across individuals (**Figure 2**; Wormwood, 2019). The focus on static assessment means important information about early detection and genesis of challenge-like and threat-like states in the face of stressors remain unknown. Information concerning the time course of psychobiological states might be useful for designing early intervention systems involving biofeedback or for identifying critical time points at which individual interventions might be most effective at mitigating threat-like physiological patterns as they unfold in real time.

an average value was taken for each 1 min of recording, and these averages are plotted here.

Future translational work would also benefit from the inclusion of complementary methodological approaches used less frequently in research on the BPS model. For instance, audio-visual data recorded continuously during a motivated performance context would be invaluable for elucidating how and why challenge and threat orientations shift dynamically as a context unfolds. Qualitative interviews with participants could shed light on important individual differences related to the tendency to experience more challengelike orientations under stress, or could suggest potential mechanisms for future exploration of factors contributing to appraisals of demands and/or resources. Considering the myriad contexts in which police officers must optimize performance and decisionmaking, future translational research would benefit from the inclusion of more diverse, real-world contexts (e.g., situations involving different combinations of cognitive, affective, social, and motoric features). Comparing diverse scenarios may offer insights on the psychological and physiological mechanisms by which challenge and threat orientations influence performance or decision-making across contexts.

### CONCLUSION

The BPS model appears well-suited for studying the psychophysiology of police performance and decision-making because challenge- and threat-like states are relevant across a wide range of social evaluative and motivated performance domains (e.g., Behnke and Kaczmarek, 2018), are associated with consistent patterns of cognitive appraisal and cardiovascular reactivity (Blascovich, 2008a), and have been shown to predict important behavioral and decision-making outcomes in stressful contexts (see Hase et al., 2019). Moreover, while threat-like states have not been *directly* linked to health outcomes, prolonged physiological activation (particularly in the HPA) can result in profound negative health consequences (e.g., McEwen, 1998). Thus, research examining challenge and threat responding among police officers in the line of duty stands to improve early detection of individuals at risk for the negative health outcomes (e.g., cardiovascular disease) that are associated with careers in law enforcement (Hartley et al., 2011).

### AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

DK and JW drafted the manuscript. ES provided substantial edits and feedback on the manuscript.

#### REFERENCES

coping under stress during actual events. *Ergonomics* 60, 1112–1122. doi: 10.1080/00140139.2016.1260165

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

*Copyright © 2019 Kelley, Siegel and Wormwood. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.*

# Applying the Theory of Constructed Emotion to Police Decision Making

*Joseph Fridman1 , Lisa Feldman Barrett1,2 , Jolie B. Wormwood3 and Karen S. Quigley1,4 \**

*1 Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, United States, 2 Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, United States, 3 Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, United States, 4 Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital, Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research, Bedford, MA, United States*

Law enforcement personnel commonly make decisions in stressful circumstances, where the costs associated with errors are high and sometimes fatal. In this paper, we apply a powerful theoretical approach, the theory of constructed emotion (TCE), to understand decision making under evocative circumstances. This theory posits that the primary purpose of a brain is to predictively regulate physiological resources to coordinate the body's motor activity and learning in the short term, and to meet the body's needs for growth, survival, and reproduction in the long term. This process of managing the brain and body's energy needs, called allostasis, is based on the premise that a brain *anticipates* bodily needs and attempts to meet those needs before they arise (e.g., vestibular activity that raises sympathetic nervous system activity *before* standing), because this is more efficient than responding to energetic needs after the fact. In this view, all mental events cognition, emotion, perception, and action—are shaped by allostasis, and thus all decision making is embodied, predictive, and concerned with balancing energy needs. We also posit a key role for the autonomic nervous system (ANS) in regulating short-term energy expenditures, such that the ANS influences experience and behavior under stressful circumstances, including police decision making. In this paper, we first explain the core features of the TCE, and then offer insights for understanding police decision making in complex, real-world situations. In so doing, we describe how the TCE can be used to guide future studies of realistic decision making in occupations in which people commonly make decisions in evocative situations or under time pressure, such as in law enforcement.

Keywords: allostasis, predictive coding, autonomic nervous system, police decision making, theory of constructed emotion, law enforcement

## INTRODUCTION

Law enforcement personnel must commonly make high-stakes decisions in stressful circumstances where the costs associated with errors are high and sometimes fatal. The Justice Department found that in 15% of police shootings in Philadelphia over 8 years, the person who was shot was unarmed, but half of these unarmed individuals were perceived to have a weapon (Fachner and Carter, 2015). However, it would be a mistake to assume that decision making errors in stressful contexts are the result of any single feature of a complex situation. Rather, we theorize that decisions made by police officers in highly stressful, time-pressured circumstances are

#### *Edited by:*

*Eamonn Patrick Arble, Eastern Michigan University, United States*

#### *Reviewed by:*

*Hugo Critchley, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, United Kingdom Robert J. Lowe, University of Gothenburg, Sweden*

> *\*Correspondence: Karen S. Quigley<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### *Specialty section:*

*This article was submitted to Psychology for Clinical Settings, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology*

*Received: 30 March 2019 Accepted: 08 August 2019 Published: 11 September 2019*

#### *Citation:*

*Fridman J, Barrett LF, Wormwood JB and Quigley KS (2019) Applying the Theory of Constructed Emotion to Police Decision Making. Front. Psychol. 10:1946. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01946*

**73**

multiply determined by features of the decision making situation, including affectively driven perceptual effects, the current bodily state of the officer, and the officer's past history or prior experiences in similar contexts.

These high-stakes situations, termed "critical incidents," often involve witnessing, experiencing, or enacting violent behavior. Officers often describe having distorted perceptions, memory, and thinking both during and after such an incident (Alpert et al., 2012; Novy, 2012). The traumatic distress associated with these critical incidents also can lead to less effective coping and poorer decision making in similar future situations (Cox et al., 2018). Understanding and ultimately improving workplace decision making by personnel who must commonly act under such highly stressful circumstances is important, first and foremost, because their decisions affect the well-being of all those involved. Performance in stressful circumstances can also have important workplace performance and health consequences for law enforcement personnel long after a critical incident (Violanti and Paton, 1999; Franke et al., 2002; Arnetz et al., 2009; Gershon et al., 2009). These same concerns also arise for those in other high-stakes professions, such as military personnel (Johnson et al., 2005; Kavanagh, 2005; Bray et al., 2009; Smith et al., 2011; Rush et al., 2016), or corrections officers (Johnson et al., 2005; Ghaddar et al., 2008; Costello et al., 2015).

To understand and minimize errors in decision making in stressful, complex, real-world contexts, we need innovative experiments and field studies that leverage recent technological advances in ambulatory data collection, including measures of peripheral physiology, cognition, behavioral action, and context (e.g., Andersen and Gustafsberg, 2016; Andersen et al., 2016a,b, 2018). The increasing availability of wearable technologies that can support data collection in more ecologically valid stressful workplace scenarios provides a set of much-needed methodological tools for assessing the physiological changes, real-world behavior, and context of law enforcement officers when they are making mission-critical decisions in the line of duty.

This important translational empirical work must also be guided by current theory. Much of the prior work on decision making in high-stakes workplaces has borrowed from psychological theories derived from experimental evidence gathered in highly controlled, laboratory settings. Such theories often do not translate well to understanding more complex, multifactorial decision making situations, or to a decisionmaker who is experiencing strong physiological and subjective arousal in a real-world scenario. In contrast, our recent theory, the theory of constructed emotion (TCE; Barrett, 2017a,b; Hutchinson and Barrett, 2019), can situate the features of multi-factorial, real-world decision making within a single theoretical framework. The TCE integrates evidence from neuroscience, physiology, evolutionary and developmental biology, computational modeling, and engineering to explain how humans construct mental representations (e.g., cognitions, emotions, perceptions, and actions). This framework generates testable hypotheses about how humans will behave and make decisions in real-world scenarios or highly realistic simulations and can guide future work aimed at understanding decision making in stressful occupational settings, like law enforcement. Using this theoretical framework to guide such work has strong potential to result in positive impacts on work performance, health outcomes, and potentially, even to enhance public trust in law enforcement (Jackson, 2015).

Here, we first explain the core features of the TCE, and then illustrate key insights arising from the TCE that are relevant for understanding police decision making in stressful, complex, real-world situations. In so doing, we describe how the TCE can be used to guide future studies of naturalistic decision making in law enforcement or other similar occupations in which people must commonly make decisions under time pressure in stressful or affectively evocative situations.

## THE THEORY OF CONSTRUCTED EMOTION

#### Predictive Allostasis: Regulating Energy in the Service of Action and the Role of the Autonomic Nervous System

The theory of constructed emotion (TCE) posits that the primary purpose of an organism's brain is to coordinate (or regulate) all of the physiological resources required to meet the organism's imminent needs for action and learning in the short term, and for growth, survival, and reproduction in the long term (Barrett, 2017a,b; Hutchinson and Barrett, 2019). Extensive evidence from the neuroscientific and physiological literatures suggests that energy regulation is best optimized when the brain anticipates bodily needs (Sterling, 2004, 2012); it is more energetically efficient to prepare to meet anticipated needs than to wait and respond to needs after they arise (e.g., if your brain is going to stand you up, the vestibular system increases sympathetic nervous system activity before you stand, lest you faint, which would be energetically costly). This process of predictively managing energy needs is called *allostasis* (Sterling, 2004, 2012; Sterling and Laughlin, 2015). All activities of allostatic regulation—resource acquisition, allocation, and utilization—are posited to operate on a predictive basis to enhance metabolic efficiency. From an organism-level view, we theorize that all mental events—cognition, emotion, perception, and action—are predictive and subject to the constraints of allostasis. As a result, all decision making is embodied, predictive, and fundamentally dependent on how our brains anticipate energy needs.

For the brain to regulate the body, and for the body to maintain support for the brain's energy needs, there is bi-directional communication between the brain and the systems of the body (i.e., everything outside the brain). The brain sends control messages to organs in the periphery (referred to as efferent signals), and also receives messages from peripheral physiological systems [e.g., afferent signals from organs innervated by or influenced by the autonomic nervous system (ANS), the endocrine system (hormones), and the immune system], which indicate the current state of the body outside the brain (Cacioppo and Berntson, 2011). The ANS, the endocrine system and the immune system all play particularly critical roles in energy regulation because they are the systems that most quickly and directly marshal oxygen, glucose, and other necessary energetic mediators to tissues where they are needed (Bray, 1986). The ANS, which can change organ function on the order of milliseconds to seconds to support imminent action, is especially critical in supporting decision making and related behaviors under stressful circumstances and time pressure. Thus, the ANS is a critical short-term mediator of how the brain achieves allostasis and supports human decision making and action.

### The Brain Creates an Internal Predictive Model to Achieve Allostasis

Recent neuroscientific evidence and computational modeling both converge on the idea that to maintain allostasis, a brain constructs an internal predictive model of the world, and this model includes its own body (Pezzulo et al., 2015; Sterling and Laughlin, 2015; Seth and Friston, 2016; Corcoran and Hohwy, 2017; Barrett, 2017a; Hutchinson and Barrett, 2019). From this perspective, sometimes termed predictive coding (Clark, 2013), Bayesian inference (Deneve, 2008), active inference (Friston, 2010), or predictive processing (Hutchinson and Barrett, 2019), the brain does not simply react to incoming sensory inputs from the world (or from the body); rather it anticipates these inputs by constructing a model of its body in the world. Mental events (i.e., cognitions, emotions, perceptions, and actions) arise from the dynamics of the brain's "predictions" about the assumed causes of sensory events. These predictions are constantly checked against incoming sensory input ("prediction error"). When prediction error is sufficiently large, the brain updates its internal model, which results in more accurate predictions for similar future situations. The brain aims to construct a model of itself and the body in the world so that fewer unexpected events are encountered in the world, minimizing adverse effects on the organism's short- and long-term allostasis.

### Affect Is Central to the Brain's Internal Model

Thirty years of anatomical research (based on tract-tracing studies in primates and other mammals) (Barbas, 2015) indicates that cortical limbic regions are at the top of the brain's predictive hierarchy (Barrett and Simmons, 2015; Chanes and Barrett, 2016; Barrett, 2017a,b). These regions, which include portions of the cingulate cortex, ventral anterior insula, posterior orbitofrontal cortex, and entorhinal cortex, have the least laminar differentiation, meaning that cytoarchitecturally, they are agranular, with larger layers V and VI, no defined layer IV, and undifferentiated layers II and III (Barbas, 2015; Chanes and Barrett, 2016). These regions are hypothesized to issue, or send, predictions to more differentiated granular cortical areas, including primary motor and sensory cortices (Barbas and García-Cabezas, 2015; Barrett and Simmons, 2015; Finlay and Uchiyama, 2015; Chanes and Barrett, 2016), as seen in **Figure 1**. These same cortical limbic regions both support allostasis (Kleckner et al., 2017) and receive relayed sensory inputs from organs, joints, and skin in the periphery, which is called interoception (Vaitl, 1996; Cameron, 2001; Craig, 2002, 2003a,b, 2009, 2014; Berntson et al., 2018). Interoceptive visceral afferents from organs innervated by or influenced by the autonomic nervous system (ANS), the endocrine system (hormones), and the immune system carry relatively low-resolution information, and we hypothesize that these inputs are experienced as low-dimensional affective feelings (i.e., general feelings that vary in pleasantness/unpleasantness and activation/deactivation; Barrett and Bliss-Moreau, 2009; Barrett, 2017a; Hutchinson and Barrett, 2019). As such, interoceptive sensations from the periphery and their representation as affective feelings are at the core of the neural architecture which issues the brain's internal model (Craig, 2014; Chanes and Barrett, 2016; Barrett, 2017a,b; Hutchinson and Barrett, 2019). Your brain is always trying to maintain allostasis, and so it is always modeling the interoceptive state of the body. Therefore, affective feelings are a property of consciousness, and affect is at the core of all mental events that your brain constructs.

### Accurate Predictions Require Variability Across Mental Instances

A critical feature enabling a brain to operate predictively is its ability to generalize or create higher level summaries from particulars. That means that the organism must constantly query its existing model about the current sensory array and what it is *most like* from its prior experience. Generalizations, also called abstractions, are constructed as an organism updates its internal model based on a wide range of highly variable instances over time. Predictions issued from limbic cortices to sensory and motor cortices are constructed from the organism's past experience with similar internal and external contexts. However, these contexts are never exactly the same twice. This means that the brain must quickly generalize from one situation to another even when they are somewhat different, creating *ad hoc* generalizations in the moment to categorize a given instance as more similar to one prior experience than to another. Predictions underlying particular instances of cognitions, emotions, perceptions, and actions will, therefore, be highly context-bound. Because predictions are context-bound, and the contexts in which humans find themselves can vary widely, we expect there to be substantial variability across *instances* of experience within a person, even when the instances are categorized and labeled as belonging to the same *category* of experience (e.g., anger). Instances labeled with the same category will have variable features—including affective features, physiological features, action or movementrelated features, and brain features. For example, fear in the context of taking a rollercoaster ride has different features than fear in the context of hearing footsteps following you while walking in a dark alley. Both the common and the divergent features across each of the variable instances of a category are hypothesized to become part of the generalization (or abstraction) for that category as constructed by the individual as part of their internal model. The internal model will reflect that some subset of the features of one instance of the category will be similar across instances, but that the exact subset of features, including contextual features, will vary across different instances labeled as belonging to the same category.

FIGURE 1 | Reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press from Barrett (2017b). A depiction of predictive coding in the human brain. (A) Key limbic and paralimbic cortices (in blue) provide cortical control of the body's internal milieu. Primary MC is depicted in red, and primary sensory regions are in yellow. For simplicity, only primary visual, interoceptive, and somatosensory cortices are shown; subcortical regions are not shown. (B) Limbic cortices initiate visceromotor predictions to the hypothalamus and brainstem nuclei (e.g., PAG, PBN, nucleus of the solitary tract) to regulate the autonomic, neuroendocrine, and immune systems (solid lines). The incoming sensory inputs from the internal milieu of the body are carried along the vagus nerve and small diameter C and Ad fibers to limbic regions (dotted lines). Comparisons between prediction signals and ascending sensory input result in prediction error that is available to update the brain's internal model. In this way, prediction errors are learning signals and therefore adjust subsequent predictions. (C) Efferent copies of visceromotor predictions are sent to MC as motor predictions (solid lines) and prediction errors are sent from MC to limbic cortices (dotted lines). (D) Sensory cortices receive sensory predictions from several sources. They receive efferent copies of visceromotor predictions (black lines) and efferent copies of motor predictions (red lines). Sensory cortices with less well-developed lamination (e.g., primary interoceptive cortex) also send sensory predictions to cortices with more well-developed granular architecture (e.g., in this figure, somatosensory and primary visual cortices, gold lines). For simplicity's sake, prediction errors are not depicted in panel D. sgACC, subgenual anterior cingulate cortex; vmPFC, ventromedial prefrontal cortex; pgACC, pregenual anterior cingulate cortex; dmPFC, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex; MCC, midcingulate cortex; vaIns, ventral anterior insula; daIns, dorsal anterior insula and includes ventrolateral prefrontal cortex; SMA, supplementary motor area; PMC, premotor cortex m/pIns, mid/posterior insula (primary interoceptive cortex); SSC, somatosensory cortex; V1, primary visual cortex; and MC, motor cortex (for relevant neuroanatomical references, see Kleckner et al., 2017).

The nature and extent of this immense variability has been a significant point of contention, for example, among theorists who disagree about whether the variability in features that is observed among instances labeled as belonging to the same emotion category is meaningful (as the TCE suggests) or simply random error (as other theories posit). Emotions traditionally were, and in some quarters still are, commonly assumed to have an essence, meaning that all instances of a given emotion are presumed to have a core similarity either at a neural or physiological level (Barrett, 2006, 2017a,b). However, empirical evidence reveals a striking lack of consistency in emotional experience and expression, such that specific emotional instances (e.g., an experience categorized as anger or fear in a specific time and place) are highly variable across contexts, even within a person. Empirically, there are no biological "fingerprints" for specific emotion categories in the brain (Lindquist et al., 2012; Clark-Polner et al., 2017), in the face (Barrett et al., 2019), in the body (Siegel et al., 2018a), or in experience (Lindquist et al., 2013). That is, an emotion does not have unique and consistent physical features across individuals, or even within the same individual across instances. Thus, quite distinct experiences can be categorized (or labeled) as belonging to the same emotion category but still vary considerably in their features (e.g., whether anger is associated with a heart rate increase or decrease, or whether it is associated with a scowl on the face or not). Likewise, very similar affective experiences can be categorized and labeled as belonging to different emotion categories across instances (Lindquist et al., 2013). For example, it can be difficult to tell if you are feeling fear or excitement in advance of an important event (e.g., a marriage, the birth of a child, a major sporting event of your favorite team). According to the TCE, and consistent with decades of empirical evidence, variability within and across instances of different emotion categories (including distress) is the norm, and this variability is functionally important and relevant for allostasis, because allostatic needs will vary across situations that have different energetic consequences even for instances labeled as the same emotional or affective experience.

### NOVEL IMPLICATIONS FROM THE THEORY OF CONSTRUCTED EMOTION FOR DECISION MAKING IN LAW ENFORCEMENT

In this section, we use law enforcement examples to demonstrate how the TCE offers a unique perspective from which to examine decision making under stress among law enforcement personnel. The TCE offers several key insights that may shed new light on energetic, brain, and/or bodily processes that underlie decision making under stressful circumstances or that could be leveraged to design interventions to improve decision making in such contexts. We provide examples of (1) how allostasis and affective feelings predictively shape perception and action; (2) the central role of interoception and related peripheral physiological arousal in cognition, emotion, perception, and action; and (3) the role of individual differences and variability in cognition, emotion, perception, action, and thereby, decision making in law enforcement settings.

### The Role of Affective Feelings in Predictively Shaping Perception and Action

Between 2007 and 2014, 49% of "officer-involved shootings" in Philadelphia in which the victim was unarmed were attributed to "threat perception failures," meaning a non-threatening object or movement led the officer to perceive the subject as being armed (Fachner and Carter, 2015). Despite having roughly the same population of White and Black citizens, 80% of the suspects in officer-involved shootings in Philadelphia during this time period were Black, with the US Justice Department reporting that Black suspects were most likely to be the subject of a threat perception failure (Fachner and Carter, 2015). This is consistent with other findings showing that individuals from racial minority groups experience more force in encounters with police (Fryer, 2016), are treated less respectfully during traffic stops (Voigt et al., 2017), are more likely to be shot at, even when unarmed (Brown and Langan, 2001; Ross, 2015), and that further, these effects remain even when suspect behavior is controlled for (Scott et al., 2017). This is also consistent with other empirical work demonstrating that social categories like race have a pronounced impact on threat perception (Payne, 2001; Correll et al., 2002, 2007; Eberhardt et al., 2004; Payne et al., 2005), and that affective feelings are integral to how we perceive and respond to others across a range of social categories (Cuddy and Fiske, 2002; DeSteno et al., 2004; Russell and Fiske, 2008). The racial and cultural stereotypes thought to underlie these biases in threat perception are imbued with affective features, and some data suggest that more general beliefs concerning the likelihood of encountering interpersonal threats may partially explain race-based shooter biases, even in the absence of racial or cultural stereotypes (Miller et al., 2012).

The TCE, at its heart, posits that brains use predictive processing in the service of optimizing energy regulation. The agranular limbic brain areas involved in implementing allostasis and the experience of affect are both central to energy regulation, and anatomically speaking, reside at the top of the brain's predictive hierarchy. As a result, affect and affective predictions critically shape perception and behavior (see, e.g., Chanes et al., 2018). In previous research, we have proposed that you "perceive what you feel," a phenomenon we have termed "affective realism" (Anderson et al., 2011, 2012; Barrett and Wormwood, 2015; Wormwood et al., 2018; Siegel et al., 2018b). This means that affective experience critically shapes what we *expect to* and *actually do* see, hear, and smell. In this way, affect infuses all perception and action, including decision making in the timepressured, stressful situations encountered by police officers.

We have demonstrated that both experimental affective inductions and naturally occurring evocative situations evoking intense affect can significantly shape perceptions of social and threat-related information (Baumann and DeSteno, 2010; Wormwood et al., 2016, 2017, 2019; Siegel et al., 2018b). For example, individuals induced to experience an instance of anger were more likely to exhibit biased perceptual decision making in a gun detection task, such that they were more likely to make misidentification errors "seeing" unarmed individuals as armed than vice versa (Baumann and DeSteno, 2010). Critically, this biased perception was causally explained by anger's influence on predictions: angry participants expected to encounter more armed suspects, and controlling for these expectancies mitigated the impact of anger on threat perception. In another experiment, participants in Boston tested about 1 month after the Boston Marathon bombings completed a threat perception task where they attempted to shoot armed targets and avoid shooting unarmed targets (Wormwood et al., 2016). Prior to the threat perception task, participants viewed images taken from news coverage of the bombings that were either accompanied by threat-related headlines (e.g., "Not Since 9/11") or more affectively positive headlines focused on the community's resilience following the attack (e.g., "Boston Strong"). Participants made more errors shooting unarmed targets if they had viewed the negatively framed terror attack images than if they viewed the positively framed images. Critically, we showed that the observed increase in shooting of unarmed targets was caused by decreased perceptual sensitivity (i.e., a reduced ability to distinguish targets holding a gun from those who were not), and perceptual sensitivity was also impacted by how strongly the participant reported having been affected by the bombings when they occurred.

Taken together, theoretical and empirical work suggest that feeling significantly distressed or threatened can predictively contribute to perceiving the world as more stressful or threatening in a very literal sense. This work also suggests that an officer's experience of danger or threat can be "affectively real" even when the situation is non-threatening in other ways (i.e., there is no weapon). Affective realism also has implications for how bystanders think about misperceptions in police decision making: when feeling threatened or affectively aroused, officers could "see" a gun in the hand of a suspect or perceive a suspect as behaving aggressively whereas someone who is not feeling threatened or not affectively aroused would not. This is not a *post hoc* justification for errant behavior, but the perception of danger can be objectively incorrect even while being "affectively real." This perspective strongly implies that police officer trainings should (1) help police officers learn to be more attentive to their bodily feelings, (2) help officers recognize when their perceptions could be shaped by their predictions, and (3) help them learn to consider alternative interpretations before a situation becomes a critical incident or a critical incident becomes even more dire.

### Interoception Predictively Shapes Cognition, Emotion, Perception, and Action

Consider a police officer nearing the end of a busy, stressful 12-h patrol shift. The officer steps back into their cruiser after drinking two cups of coffee when a dispatch call comes in about a nearby prowler. Driving over to investigate, the officer's heart is racing, palms sweating, stomach clenching, and face flushing. Minutes later, in the same neighborhood, the officer encounters a teenage loiterer on the phone, who, when seeing the officer, scowls and turns away. The officer loudly instructs the teenager to end the call, turn around, and answer some questions. From the perspective of the TCE, the officer's internal sensations of greater peripheral physiological arousal predictively shape their experience and actions in this situation, and do so regardless of whether the officer is consciously aware of these sensations. If the officer is not consciously aware of these changes—in this case a quickly beating heart, sweating, clenched stomach, and facial flush—this physiological arousal may instead be incorporated into the officer's internal model of the current situation as threatening (i.e., the heightened bodily arousal shapes affective predictions concerning the presence or likelihood of threats that would necessitate the current bodily arousal, directing perception and action accordingly). In fact, those sensations are internal to the officer and very likely created by other features of the context: the two cups of coffee just consumed, the recently received call to be on the lookout for a prowler, and the rest of the officer's day having been busy and stressful. The officer who is unaware of the possible range of sources for these feelings is very likely to construe the situation with the loitering teenager as tense, the teenager as surly, and as a result, the officer might act harshly. The TCE highlights the importance of making police officers aware of the ways in which internal sensations, which can arise from many different sources, can color our experience and our actions. Indeed, several of the newest officer training protocols specifically make officers more aware of their physiological arousal by enabling them to measure and track it over time using wearable devices, and then training officers to use strategies to reduce this arousal (Arnetz et al., 2009, 2013; Andersen and Gustafsberg, 2016; Andersen et al., 2018).

The peripheral physiological systems that are responsible for feeling aroused or activated, most notably the cardiovascular, respiratory, and gastrointestinal systems, are the very same systems that support attainment and movement of energetic resources (such as oxygen and glucose) around the body to where they are needed to enact allostasis. Indeed, we meet most of our most basic short- and long-term allostatic needs by moving the body—this includes respiration, consumption (of water and nutrients), communication, copulation, and ambulation and associated changes in posture. Thus, allostasis requires action planning, which itself requires very context-specific assessments of predicted metabolic needs and environmental affordances that must be tightly coupled with changes in peripheral physiological activity which prepare for and enable these upcoming actions. The idea that the cardiovascular system operated predominantly in the service of action was earlier posited by Paul Obrist and colleagues, as the concept of "cardio-somatic coupling" such that cardiac activity changed in advance of expected action (Obrist et al., 1969, 1970). From this perspective, we propose that future research aimed at improving police decision making under stressful situations would benefit from robust measurement of physiological changes during both training scenarios as well as real-world law enforcement situations. Tracking these measures may help officers learn to attend to the myriad possible sources of physiological activation and feelings of arousal so that they can consider alternative explanations for the felt arousal. Police training that incorporates peripheral physiological measures and can demonstrate these effects for officers may help make very real the importance of such bodily changes in a law enforcement context.

Future research is needed to examine how allostasis and interoception together create mental experiences, especially in dynamically changing real-world contexts. Although technologies enabling the collection of affective, physiological, or contextual information could be useful as training feedback, there are obstacles to deploying self-monitoring technologies in the field. For one, despite the increasing prominence of body camera surveillance and calls within the profession to implement biometric monitoring of police officers (Bedford, 2019), there is still reticence among first-responders to continuous monitoring of their physiology, perhaps because such initiatives are still nascent and not in common use. Others are unconvinced that the benefits of such sociotechnical tools outweigh potential accompanying downsides which could negatively impact decision making and performance—for example, inadvertently inducing anxiety or panic in officers or distracting from the processing or awareness of critical exteroceptive sensory information. Still, some researchers have been able to build collaborative partnerships with police officers to test the use of techniques like portable heart rate variability biofeedback to reduce lethal force errors (see, e.g., Andersen et al., 2018).

Another key feature of these bodily sensations that is highlighted by the TCE framework (and noted above) is that the sensory signals from the organs, joints, and skin of the body (interoceptive signals; Craig, 2002, 2003a,b, 2009) have lower fidelity (low signal-to-noise ratio) than those coming from the exteroceptive senses (Barrett and Simmons, 2015; Chanes and Barrett, 2016; Khalsa et al., 2018; Hutchinson and Barrett, 2019). We propose that the low fidelity of interoceptive signals is a key reason why it can be difficult to pinpoint the source or meaning of low-dimensional affective feelings, which are proposed to be the experiential sequelae of interoceptive signals. These diffuse interoceptive signals provide a source of prediction error to the brain, which can alter the brain's internal predictive model, and in turn generate new predictions.

Interoceptive signaling from the heart *via* the baroreceptors has been shown to be one interoceptive signal influencing behavior and action. Interoceptive information from the heart arrives in phases because the pressure-sensitive baroreceptors fire at systole, when the heart is ejecting blood into the aorta, and are less active during diastole. This phenomenon provides a unique opportunity for exploring state-related changes in affectively mediated prediction because researchers can synchronize the presentation of exteroceptive stimuli with systole or diastole to vary the interoceptive context concurrent with a constant exteroceptive stimulus. Time-locked presentation of stimuli with cardiac interoceptive information can enhance or inhibit aspects of perception, memory, and action. For example, baroreceptor stimulation reliably decreases pain ratings (Dworkin et al., 1994). Likewise, Garfinkel et al. (2013) have shown that memory for target words presented at high speeds suffered from interference when presented during systole compared to those presented during diastole, whereas detection, learning, and even exposure therapy for fearful stimuli are enhanced by presentation of stimuli at systole (Garfinkel et al., 2014; Pfeifer et al., 2017; Watson et al., 2019). This paradigm has been adapted to show that race-driven misidentifications of threat during a weapons identification task and a first-person shooter task were significantly increased by presentation during systole (Azevedo et al., 2017). These findings demonstrate the importance of developing methodologies to investigate the influence of particular interoceptive contexts on perception and action.

Critically, there are striking individual differences in sensitivity for detecting internal sensations from the body (i.e., Jones, 1994; Knapp et al., 1997; Barrett et al., 2004), or interoceptive sensitivity. Further, interoceptive sensitivity can be altered using either pharmacological methods (Khalsa et al., 2009; Hassanpour et al., 2018) or environmental stimulation (Feinstein et al., 2018). Thus, individual differences in interoceptive sensitivity could critically underlie differences across people in affective experience and behavior under stressful circumstances. Previous work also shows that interoceptive sensitivity moderates the relationship between peripheral physiological activity and self-reported experience (Barrett et al., 2004; Pollatos et al., 2007; Garfinkel et al., 2014; Pfeifer et al., 2017), such that physiology and experience or behavior are more tightly coupled in those with higher interoceptive sensitivity. In a related study, Dunn and colleagues (Dunn et al., 2010) found that participants' ability to track their heartbeats was positively correlated with the strength of the association between anticipatory bodily signals (electrodermal activity and heart rate) and decision making in an intuitive reasoning task. (However, the tracking task used in the Dunn et al. study does not permit a strictly interoceptive interpretation of the findings; for a discussion of the limitations of the heartbeat tracking task, see Ring et al., 2015; Desmedt et al., 2018). Further, higher interoceptive sensitivity does not necessarily mean that one is more interoceptively aware of or more likely to notice one's bodily states (Chentsova-Dutton and Dzokoto, 2014; Garfinkel et al., 2015, 2016; Critchley and Garfinkel, 2017). Thus, individual differences in this psychological facet of interoception may not reflect individual differences in the strength or patterning of afferent neural signaling coming from the periphery (Critchley and Garfinkel, 2017).

One implication of these findings is that police officers may also benefit from trainings that promote greater awareness of their interoceptive signals. For example, prior empirical work showed that mindfulness interventions may foster longterm increases in an individual's ability to attend to interoceptive sensations (Farb et al., 2013), and similar interventions have been shown to improve cognitive performance in a sustained attention Go/No Go task in a high-stress military cohort (Jha et al., 2017). Recent exploratory work with law enforcement personnel suggests that officers would be willing to undertake similar evidence-based training that focused on the effects of distress and trauma (Andersen et al., 2015). These findings suggest that new interventions could target interoceptive sensitivity training for police officers. Finally, we note that augmenting interoceptive awareness may not always be useful, and in some moments or contexts, higher interoceptive awareness could distract from other more pressing incoming sensory information. Thus, one needs to take this issue into account when designing an interoceptive intervention.

### The Role of Individual Differences and Variability in Cognition, Emotion, Perception, and Action

To execute physical feats in stressful situations, professionals in fields such as car racing, civil aviation, medicine, and law enforcement now commonly train using realistic, and sometimes stressful, situations. Although classroom preparation can help professionals to understand work goals, interpret training feedback, and learn some tasks, no one can learn to drive a race car, do surgery, land a plane, or become a police officer just by reading or talking about it. It takes experience to detect and assess goal-relevant signals in perceptually complex environments, to know which strategy to deploy to mitigate the chances of catastrophic failure, and to successfully complete physically demanding tasks under highly time-pressured or stressful circumstances.

The TCE specifically addresses how context-specific workoriented predictions can drive experience and behavior. In the case of police officer training, the TCE emphasizes the importance of recognizing that each instance or experience of "distress" can be quite different from every other one, and that sensations from the body also can vary considerably depending on the affective or performative (action-oriented) context of the situation. Because officers will experience a wide range of stressful situations in the field, including critical incidents, the TCE suggests that trainings must also occur across a range of diverse and highly realistic scenarios, which we propose would hasten the process of gaining needed experience and reduce the chances of real-world errors. Consistent with this perspective, a study by Arnetz et al. (2009) using realistic training scenarios provided evidence of better performance, less negative mood, less cardiovascular reactivity, and less distress in those who received real-world, in-the-moment training (termed resilience training by these authors), than in those who did not take this training (Arnetz et al., 2009). Such training also can enable an officer to focus attention on important features of the external environment and, at the same time, reduce physiological arousal that could lead to poor decisions.

Engaging in more realistic and variable training scenarios also should better prepare police officers to recognize, and potentially overcome, affective realism effects in the case of biased perceptions of threat under stressful conditions in the field. To be maximally effective, these trainings must reliably induce affective experiences with similar potency to those they may experience on the job, which can be assessed using ambulatory technology. Because prior research has demonstrated that affective feelings can shape not only actions in a threat perception task (Wormwood et al., 2016), but perceptions of social others as well (Cuddy and Fiske, 2002; DeSteno et al., 2004; Russell and Fiske, 2008), we recommend that these training situations also involve learning to consider potential alternative interpretations of others' affective states and intended actions, especially in highly evocative contexts. Officers can also be trained to consider alternative interpretations of their own affective states, which in some theoretical perspectives would be called emotion regulation, but in the TCE is simply part of the process of creating another emotional experience (see Gross and Feldman Barrett, 2011 for further discussion).

These training scenarios should also utilize other people, including other officers, to increase the realism, unpredictability, and variability in the behaviors observed in the scenarios. Inclusion of team members within the same training scenarios also can enhance cohesion especially among team members who have little prior experience with one another. Organizational science has consistently documented that building social cohesion is critical to effective teamwork (e.g., NTSB, 1994), particularly at a new worksite, or when the composition of the team is changed (Huckman and Pisano, 2006; Groysberg et al., 2008). These findings are also consistent with proposals of the TCE that unfamiliarity with or lack of predictability in the behavior of social others may lead to errors in prediction (Theriault et al., 2019), which we suggest could be corrected through ecologically valid, team-based training.

## CONCLUSION

According to Barrett (2017a,b), a person's *affective niche* comprises whatever "objects and events will impact [their] body budget, changing [their] affect" (Barrett, 2017a, p. 73). Our affective niche is shaped by the state of our bodies and our expectations about our bodies. These expectations are informed by our past experiences and our culture, which includes our prior work experiences. The affective niche of police officers and other first responders are rich and complex, involving civilians and suspects, superiors and colleagues, and a wide variety of stressful and potentially traumatic situations or events. Police officers also have to consider how their performance will be evaluated by the public, governmental groups that set policy, oversight bodies, and the media. Despite the relatively large and rich affective niche of police officers, there are strong professional pressures to avoid attending to or conceptualizing sensations as feelings or emotions, or what one survival guide for officers called the "biological rollercoaster" of policing (Gilmartin, 2002). Drodge and Murphy (2002) noted: "[i]t is ironic that police personnel are socialized to curb their own emotions, and there are strong cultural norms aimed at controlling this, whereas on the other hand, they are trained to be vigilant about other people's emotional displays, particularly criminal suspects" (Drodge and Murphy, 2002, p. 426). This report and others also describe how these norms can have longterm negative mental and physical effects on police officers and their families (Pogrebin and Poole, 1991; Galatzer-Levy et al., 2013). Some of the physical effects could arise as sequelae of the repeated autonomic nervous system and endocrine system activation that occurs over a work career characterized by frequent, stressful situations (Planche et al., 2019).

Police officers also are at increased risk for more distal possible health consequences (e.g., cardiovascular disease, links between PTSD & cardiovascular health risk, metabolic syndrome, obesity) than those in less stressful occupations (Violanti et al., 2006a,b). Many of these chronic health conditions are characterized by allostatic dysregulation and are exacerbated by police work schedules that disrupt circadian rhythms (Vila et al., 2000; Vila, 2006; Violanti et al., 2009). Critical incident exposure specifically has been found to be associated with increased occurrence of nightmares and poor global sleep quality (Neylan et al., 2002). Additionally, poor sleep in police officers mediated the relationship between traumatic stress symptoms and health functioning (Mohr et al., 2003). Finally, even though police suicides tend to be under-reported (Violanti et al., 1996), police officers are significantly more likely than the general public to die of suicide (Violanti et al., 1998), with more police officers dying of suicide in the past 3 years than in the line of duty (Lohr, 2019). In short, police officers bear major chronic health burdens that we propose are due in part to allostatic dysregulation that could be mitigated by training that focuses more on attending to, and learning to reduce, the physiological arousal that commonly occurs in the law enforcement workplace.

The TCE offers a unique perspective from which to examine the affective niche of police officers, along with other first responders, military personnel, and corrections officers, all of whom have similarly stressful occupations. Importantly, our framework suggests there are important neurobiological and energetic mechanisms that support decision making among personnel who must make high-stakes decisions under extremely stressful conditions on a regular basis. The TCE also points to novel future interventions aimed at improving decision making and cognitive performance in stressful situations. Understanding that human brains use predictive processing to enact allostasis and create cognition, emotion (including affective feelings), perception, and action will not only lead to better models of individual behavior across contexts, but to better training regimens

#### REFERENCES

and other occupational interventions to reduce negative health outcomes for police officers. Applying findings from contemporary affective science to policing could improve the accuracy of police decision making in stressful contexts and increase the mental and physical resilience of law enforcement officers.

## AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

All authors contributed to manuscript drafting and revision, and read and approved the submitted version.

#### FUNDING

This research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (W911N-16-1-0191 to KQ and JW). Salary support was also provided by R01MH113234 (PI: Barrett), 1U01CA193632-01A1 (PI: Barrett), and the John Templeton Foundation, IDs: 61814 and 61340 (PI: Barrett for JF).

#### ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this paper are those of the authors and shall not be construed as an official Department of the Army position, policy, or decision, unless so designated by other documents. We are grateful to the reviewers for their very helpful comments.

stress and health symptoms in urban police officers. *Psychosom. Med.* 65, 485–489. doi: 10.1097/01.PSY.0000041404.96597.38

population-based military cohort: findings of the Millennium Cohort Study, 2001–2008. *BMC Public Health* 11:69. doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-11-69

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

*Copyright © 2019 Fridman, Barrett, Wormwood and Quigley. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.*

# Basic Processes in Dynamic Decision Making: How Experimental Findings About Risk, Uncertainty, and Emotion Can Contribute to Police Decision Making

*Jason L. Harman\*, Don Zhang and Steven G. Greening*

*Department of Psychology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, United States*

In this paper, we review basic findings from experimental studies in judgment and decision making that could contribute to designing policies and trainings to enhance police decision making. Traditional judgment and decision-making research has focused on simple choices between hypothetical gambles, which has been criticized for its lack of generalizability to real world contexts. Over the past 15 years, researchers have focused on understanding the dynamic processes in decision making. This recent focus has allowed for the possibility of more generalizable applications of basic decision science to social issues. We review recent work in three dynamic decision-making topics: dynamic accumulation of evidence in the decision to shoot or not shoot, how previous decisions influence current choices, and how the cognitive and neurological processing of fear influences decisions and decision errors. We conclude this review with a summary of how basic experimental research can apply in policing and training.

#### *Edited by:*

*Judith Andersen, University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada*

#### *Reviewed by:*

*Ronald R. Bowles, Justice Institute of British Columbia (JIBC), Canada Adam Vaughan, Texas State University, United States*

#### *\*Correspondence:*

*Jason L. Harman<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### *Specialty section:*

*This article was submitted to Psychology for Clinical Settings, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology*

*Received: 09 July 2019 Accepted: 04 September 2019 Published: 20 September 2019*

#### *Citation:*

*Harman JL, Zhang D and Greening SG (2019) Basic Processes in Dynamic Decision Making: How Experimental Findings About Risk, Uncertainty, and Emotion Can Contribute to Police Decision Making. Front. Psychol. 10:2140. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02140*

Keywords: police decision making, decisions from experience, dynamic decision making, fear conditioning, first person shooter

## INTRODUCTION

Police decision making is dynamic. Decisions unfold over time with information (often incomplete) becoming known at different rates. The same type of decision may be made multiple times, allowing for a police officer to base a future decision on past outcomes. And decisions are made in uncertain and often changing environments. While the early pioneers of judgment and decisionmaking (JDM) research highlighted the importance of uncertainty and changing dynamics in decision making (i.e., Simon, 1955; Edwards, 1961), this focus was largely ignored for many years in favor of studying simple one-time decisions which could easily be represented in controlled experiments using choices between monetary gambles such as choose between a sure gain of \$5 or a 50/50 chance of getting \$11 or nothing (i.e., Lichtenstein and Slovic, 1971; Kahneman and Tversky, 1979). One reaction to this focus on simple decision contexts was the field of *naturalistic decision making* (NDM) which focuses on describing and understanding how people make decisions in real contexts with real world constraints (Lipshitz et al., 2001). NDM typically focuses on highly specialized experts in high stake decision circumstances, such as firefighters, military personnel, and police. This extremely successful tradition of research has grown largely from the work of Klein (1989, 1993, 1997) and is often seen in contrast to traditional JDM research programs (more concerned with the experimental control of laboratory studies) and has had more relevance to topics such as police decision making than traditional JDM research (e.g., Klein et al., 2014). In this article, we review recent experimental work in JDM that has brought dynamic decision making back into focus and discuss some of the experimental findings from this work that could contribute to improving police decision making. We begin by reviewing recent research on the decision to shoot or not shoot which analyzes the decision to shoot or not as a dynamic accumulation of evidence over time. We then review recent research on repeated experiential decisions and how they differ from one-time decisions typically studied in the lab. Finally, we review the neurocognitive mechanisms of fear in decision making. The primary goal of this article is to review recent experimental JDM research that has more fidelity with applied settings relevant to police decision making. A secondary goal of this article is to prompt future research incorporating findings from dynamic decision making to applied settings in a police context.

### DYNAMIC ACCUMULATION OF EVIDENCE IN THE DECISION TO SHOOT OR NOT SHOOT

The experimental paradigm most closely analogous to a consequential decision made by police officers is likely the decision to shoot or not shoot. Shooting decisions have been researched extensively in a simulated video game task (Correll et al., 2002, 2006). In this task, participants are presented with a series of background and target images (e.g., **Figure 1**). Each image contains a target holding various objects. In the task, participants are usually instructed to decide – as quickly as possible – whether the target is holding a gun. If a gun is identified, the participant is instructed to shoot as quickly as possible by pressing a button on the computer. In the context of police shooting decisions, the target may vary in sex, race, and appearance.

A large body of research has relied on this paradigm to examine factors (situational, individual, and contextual) of both weapon identification and shoot (vs. do not shoot) decisions. A majority of the early research focused on the shooting decision as a function of the decision maker and target's race. Correll et al. (2002), for example, found that White participants made more correct decisions to shoot an armed target who was African American, than when the target was White. Participants were also more likely to correctly decide to "not shoot" an unarmed target who was White. Correll et al. (2007) found that police officers were on average more accurate than community participants in their shooting decisions, whereas community members made more errors by setting a lower decision threshold for shooting a Black target. Decisions to shoot, however, were influenced by a number of other factors such as the mode of the presentation (video vs. picture, Cox et al., 2014), training (Correll et al., 2007), and contextual cues (neighborhood safety) (Kahn and Davies, 2017).

Cognitive factors also play a role in the accuracy of shooting decisions. For example, decision makers under high working memory load were more likely to shoot an unarmed target and more likely to make errors (e.g., shooting an unarmed target) (Kleider and Parrott, 2009; Kleider et al., 2010). Relatedly, physical fatigue – as operationalized by sleep – also had a negative effect on shooting accuracy (Ma et al., 2012). Although a large body of work on police shooting decisions has focused on the difference between Black vs. White targets, some scholars have begun examining the role of gender, SES, and other racial and ethnic backgrounds (e.g., Latino, Asian, Muslim: Fleming et al., 2010; Plant et al., 2011; Sadler et al., 2012; Moore-Berg et al., 2017).

Arguably, the classic police shooting task, which relied on statistical analysis of correct and incorrect decisions, has overlooked important temporal dynamics of the decision-making process (Pleskac et al., 2018). Pleskac and colleagues noted that the typical approach assumes that "all the information used to make a decision is extracted from the scene in a single sample" (p. 1302). Under a dynamic model of decision making called the drift diffusion model (DDM), the decision to shoot (or not shoot) can be modeled as a dynamic process where the police officer accumulates momentary evidence over a short period of time and makes a rapid decision (Ratcliff and Rouder, 2000; Klauer and Voss, 2008). The DDM describes how decisions unfold over time as a function of accumulated evidence, and it can be used to predict both choice and response time. Based on the DDM, decision makers extract information from the decision context, which is accumulated as evidence for or against the decision to shoot.

FIGURE 1 | Example stimuli of the first-person shooter task (http://psych.colorado.edu/~jclab/FPST.html).

By integrating the dynamic drift diffusion model to the classic first-person shooting task, Pleskac et al. (2018) found that the race of the target did not affect the prior bias of decision makers to shoot Black targets. However, when examining the specific decision processes under the dynamic drift diffusion model, the authors found a quicker rate of evidence accumulation when faced with a Black target. In other words, participants gathered evidence toward their decision quicker when the target was Black. Moreover, the authors found that some participants were more conservative in their decision, such that they set higher evidence thresholds when faced with a Black target. In other words, participants required more information before making a decision to shoot a Black target. Extending this work, Johnson et al. (2018) also found that untrained civilians gathered evidence quicker when faced with a Black target. This bias, however, was not observed in trained officers. The authors also found that providing decision makers with prior information – similar to police dispatch calls – eliminated racial bias at both the process and behavioral level.

The novel application of the dynamic drift diffusion model on the classic police shooting task affords future research to more finely examine how race, experience, and training combine to affect the decision-making process. Specifically, this research suggests that the various components of the decision process may be compensatory in producing the final decision. For example, a slower accumulation process and a low decision threshold may produce similar final decisions than a quick accumulation process but a more stringent decision threshold. Moreover, the presence of a decision bias may be attributed to different psychological processes (e.g., initial bias, rate of evidence accumulation, decision threshold). Taken together, under the dynamic drift diffusion model, it is possible to observe similar decision outcomes between different decision processes.

### DECISIONS FROM EXPERIENCE

Traditional research in the field of human judgment and decision making relied on experimental paradigms where participants would make a choice between two options, usually monetary gambles where the outcomes and associated probabilities were presented (e.g., Kahneman and Tversky, 1979; Kahneman et al., 1982). For example:

Which of the following would you prefer?

**A:** a 0.8 chance to get \$4 and 0.2 chance to get \$0.

This work was very influential and led to codified "knowledge" about how people react to the prospect of risks. One of the main findings from this line of work is that people overweigh or overreact to the potential of rare but serious outcomes. More recently, researchers have realized that these one-time choices with full information (referred to henceforth as decisions from description: DFD) do not accurately model how most of our decisions (and police decisions) are made. More typically, we face choices that we have made previously and will make again and we rarely have full knowledge of the exact risks associated with different possible outcomes. Likewise, typical police decisions such as whether to pull someone over are not analogous to the DFD example above. To address this, researches created new experimental paradigms where people make repeated decisions and learn about the likelihood or risks of different outcomes primarily through their experience (decisions from experience: DFE; Hertwig et al., 2004). For example, instead of choosing between options A and B above with their full description, participants would make repeated choices between two unmarked buttons, each time they chose one option they would receive \$3 and when they choose the other button they would receive \$4 80% of the time and \$0 otherwise. Results from these new paradigms have found that choice behavior is quite different and sometimes in the opposite direction when made repeatedly with experience when compared to one-time choices with full information. These systematic and robust differences between decision behavior from experience and from description have been labeled *the description-experience gap* (Hertwig et al., 2004; Hertwig and Erev, 2009). This gap makes explicit the differences in decision behavior when outcome relevant information is acquired through experiencing sequential outcomes from choice options as opposed to from a descriptive summary of the choice options.

In context, underweighting rare events through experience could explain anomalies such as low levels of flood insurance in areas where flood insurance is advised (if not mandated). When someone decides to purchase flood insurance, he/she is protecting himself/herself from the possible devastating consequences of a flood. How much this rare possibility motivates decision makers depends on how they evaluate the risk. If they were making a one-time hypothetical choice with full information of the actual likelihood of a flood along with the potential costs, they would likely fall in line with traditional findings from DFD and react strongly to the risk of floods. If however, they had lived in the same location for a long time without experiencing a flood (or even experiencing a flood but very rarely), they would react less strongly to the same objective risks. Key to this example is a key finding by Larraharge and Gonzalez (replicated over several conditions by Erev et al., 2017) that when making repeated decisions while you are presented with descriptions of risk leads to behavior early in an experiment akin to DFD (i.e., overweighting of rare events), but after only a few rounds of feedback these descriptions are largely ignored and behavior is identical to typical DFE choices (underweighting of rare events). One important caveat to the DFE finding that rare events are underweighted was found by Harman and Gonzalez (2015). Their research which combined behavioral choice data and computational cognitive modeling found that reactions to rare negative outcomes change depending on the recency of a negative rare outcome but more importantly by how often a person has experienced a positive outcome in the same circumstance. In other words, a person's likelihood of renewing flood insurance will vary depending on when the last flood was and more so, how long they have owned their house (with long time residence being more likely to cancel flood insurance).

As critical decisions made by police are typically faced repeatedly, we believe insights from DFE may be more informative than typical DFD research. Most notably, reactions to rare negative events are different and more complex than the traditional

**B:** get \$3 for sure.

finding from DFD that people overweigh or overreact to rare consequential outcomes. Several DFE studies have demonstrated that people act as if they underweigh the probability of rare events compared to defined probability when making decisions based on repeated experienced outcomes (Hertwig et al., 2004). For example, when choosing between a safe option and a risky option with a high or low outcome, participants prefer the risky option when the high outcome is likely, but they prefer the safe option when the high outcome has a probability of around 0.2 or less. This pattern is reversed when the same options are presented with full written descriptions (Erev et al., 2010). The *description-experience gap* has been found to be a robust phenomenon (Barron and Erev, 2003; Hertwig et al., 2004; Gonzalez and Dutt, 2011) with the reversal in reactions to rare outcomes being the most consequential finding.

In terms of police decision making and use of force in particular, we believe that JDM's recent focus on dynamic experiential decision making is an important step in bringing laboratory research closer to real world applications for police decision making and training. In terms of the focus of this special issue, we think of the use of lethal force as a reaction to a rare consequential event. A vast majority of encounters made by police officers result in a non-violent outcome on both sides. On very rare occasions, police find themselves in situations that may warrant the use of force while situations which warrant the use of lethal force are even more rare. Error rates in the use of lethal force then would represent the overweighting or overreaction to the actual risks in the environment. The results from Harman and Gonzalez (2015), that the overreaction to rare events is dynamic and depends on the frequency of non-consequential outcomes experienced, would predict that seasoned officers with years of experiencing encounters resolved without the use of force would be less likely to overreact to low likelihood risks than newer officers. This hypothesis however may only capture part of risk perceptions when making repeated decisions. As will be outlined in the next section, our perceptions of risks may not be influenced solely by actual outcomes experienced in the past, but also by the outcomes of others (through social communication or media coverage), imagined outcomes, expectations, or simulated outcomes (i.e., training). All of these taken together could easily create a decision context where the rare outcome that warrants the use of lethal force is perceived as not that rare at all. Therefore, simply educating officers of actual base rate risks would be ineffective. Rather, repeated experiences of positive outcomes – either imagined or in training, may be an effective way to moderate the weighting of rare events, thus reducing error rates. Thus, the literature would recommend creating more positive outcomes in training scenarios, rather than a central focus on lethal force outcomes.

### NEUROCOGNITIVE INFLUENCE OF FEAR ON DECISION MAKING

Police as a group have significantly more exposure to traumatic events, such as being assaulted, viewing assault, or viewing a dead body, than those in the general population (Haugen et al., 2012; Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2017; Morgan and Kena, 2018), which appears associated with psychological distress and worry (Leino et al., 2011). They also appear to be more likely to experience post-traumatic stress disorder than the general population (Kessler and Chiu, 2005; Maia et al., 2007; Klimley et al., 2018) and may be at greater risk for death by homicide and suicide compared to the general population (Violanti, 2010). How might either having such experiences or even simply learning about them affect one's emotional state and subsequently one's decision making?

One likely important factor in police decisions involves the impact of emotions on decision making, particularly fear. For example, a state of fear has been associated with increased processing of aversive information (Robinson et al., 2011). On the other hand, a state of fear has also been found to improve response inhibition. Specifically, participants made fewer commission errors on no-go trials of a go/no-go task while under threat of shock versus safe (Robinson et al., 2013). One avenue for potentially bettering our understanding of how emotions affect decision making for police officers is to first consider the basic science of fear (or threat) conditioning.

One of the most common ways of studying fear (or the anticipation of threat) is fear conditioning *via* classical conditioning. In classical fear conditioning, a neutral stimulus such as an auditory tone or a visual object (i.e., the conditioned stimulus with reinforcement, CS+) is paired with an inherently aversive stimulus such as a mild shock or the sound of nails on slate (i.e., the unconditioned stimulus, US). Successful classical fear conditioning has occurred if the CS+ elicits a measurable conditioned response (CR), such a skin conductance response (SCR), similar to, though often of lesser magnitude than, the unconditioned response (UR) elicited by the US alone. Often, classical fear conditioning involves having participants differentiate the CS+ from a second neutral stimulus that is never paired with the US (i.e., the conditioned stimulus without reinforcement, CS−). In cases of differential fear conditioning, one will observe a significantly greater CR for the CS+ compared to the CS−.

Relevant to the current topic, humans can acquire fear conditioning in two additional scenarios, neither of which involves the actual experience of the US. The first is vicarious fear conditioning (which has also been observed in non-human primates) in which participants develop a fear CR by observing another person undergo a classical fear conditioning experiment. In such cases, participant who never experienced the CS+ paired with the US nevertheless evinces a CR when viewing the CS+ versus CS−, such as a differential SCR (Olsson and Phelps, 2004) and differential activation of the aIn and dACC (Olsson et al., 2007). The second method by which humans can acquire fear associations is *via* instructed fear learning. In such experiments, participants are first told explicitly that one of the conditioned stimuli will be paired with the US and the other will never be paired with the US. Later, participants are shown both the CS+ and the CS−, though neither is ever physically paired with the US. As with both classical and vicarious fear conditioning, instructed fear conditioning has been observed as both a greater SCR and more activation in the aIn and dACC when viewing the CS+ compared to the CS− (Olsson and Phelps, 2004; Mechias et al., 2010). Taken together, to the extent that a fear response can affect one's decision making at any one moment, not only are the fearrelated experiences one has had important, but of potential concern are the fear-related experience has one seen or heard about.

Finally, when considering the potential role of fear in police decision making, one should also consider what might broadly be called context-dependent fear conditioning. This includes fear conditioning to environmental cues *per se* or the role of environmental cues as "occasion setters" (i.e., when a certain context qualifies the significance of a given CS) (Maren et al., 2013) and non-reinforced stimuli with semantic or conceptual connections to the CS+. Regarding the former, physical environments that are paired with the US elicit greater SCRs and activation of the aIn than environments never paired with shock (Alvarez et al., 2008; Marschner et al., 2008). Other research has found that environmental information modifies participants' response to conditioned stimuli. When the environmental context predicts that a cue will be paired with the US, then participants have a larger CR, compared to when the environmental context predicts that the cue is not associated with receiving the US, though in both conditions, participants receive the same number of USs (Indovina et al., 2011). In the case of decisions to shoot, one recent study found that participants were more likely to make decisions to shoot in perceived threatening neighborhood compared to a perceived safe neighborhood (Kahn and Davies, 2017). Other contextual factors that appear to impact fear conditioning include semantic similarity and conceptual connections. For example, participants who are fear conditioned to a specific word display generalized fear conditioning (i.e., conditioning to a non-reinforced CS) to an orthographically distinct yet semantically related word (Boyle et al., 2016; Grégoire and Greening, 2019a). Additionally, conceptual factors such as category membership can lead to generalized fear conditioning. For example, pairing 50% of animal pictures in a set with shock produced a generalized CR to the other animal pictures in the set that were never paired with shock (Dunsmoor et al., 2012).

It is possible that police experience legitimate states of fear, while nevertheless overestimating the relative risk present in any one situation. Such fear can be acquired from experience, observation, or word-of-mouth, and can potentially affect decision making. On the other hand, however, civilians may underestimate the degree of legitimately fear-producing experiences that police draw upon, implicitly or explicitly, during any given situations. This may be because civilians have relatively few fear-related instances to draw upon when imagining how they would have reacted in a given situation. Regarding police, one potentially beneficial strategy might be to intervene in the attenuation of fear associations and the calibration of fear reactions to contextual factors.

One of the common treatments used in disorders associated with fear, such as PTSD, is imaginal exposure therapy (Holmes and Mathews, 2010), which has also been used for police officers (Haugen et al., 2012). To date, there is little experimental evidence detailing the most important factors and mechanisms by which imagery can be used to attenuate fear-conditioned associations, though this has recently begun to change. For example, either repeatedly imagining or viewing the CS+ without the US produced a similar degree of fear extinction (Reddan et al., 2018). Another way to attenuate fear is *via* reconsolidation. In fear reconsolidation, a memory probe of the CS+ is presented followed by a brief (10 min to 1 h) waiting period, followed by extinction trials. This procedure may produce more durable fear attenuation such that the fear-conditioned response is less likely to spontaneously recover (Schiller et al., 2010; Agren et al., 2012). Recent research has found that mental imagery can be used in fear reconsolidation procedures, for example by having participants simply imagine the memory probe to open the reconsolidation window (Grégoire and Greening, 2019b) or having participants imagine the CS+ during the extinction trials once the reconsolidation window is opened (Agren et al., 2017). Additionally, there are situations in which one might experience a fear response acutely. In such situations, active down-regulation of the fear response can be attempted using strategies of cognitive control or reappraisal. For example, Delgado et al. (2008) had participants down-regulate (i.e., suppress) their fear response to a CS+ by diverting their thoughts to "something calming in nature." This attenuated both the SCR to the CS+ and brain activity in parts of fear conditioning network including the insula.

Police attend annual recertification training in which they undergo many varied "police call" simulations and interactions, either *via* video or live with individuals acting out a scene. Police officers are required to resolve the situation while their performance is being assessed. The results of the assessment either requalify the officers to handle their gun and go back out in the field, or they would not. While it may not be desirable for training to excessively suppress fear responses to threat, there could be a legitimate need to improve the accuracy of the fear response. Can this training help to improve the calibration of the fear-conditioned response? There is no clear answer to the question, but if one were to undertake in answering it, here are some factors one might want to consider. The goal of such training could aim to improve the discriminability of the fear response, with the aim that this improvement would also improve decisions to use force. In terms of the fear response, the goal could be to maintain "hits" of the fear response (i.e., fear when threat is present) while reducing "false alarms" of the fear response (i.e., fear when threat is not present). Furthermore, we may want to reduce "misses" of the fear response (i.e., no fear when threat is present) and maximize "correct rejections" of the fear response (i.e., no fear when threat is not present). In order to determine how police training affects the fear response, however, we need to consider the multiple factors that have been described above. In terms of decisions to use force, we might ask how the presence of a fear response affects the parameters involved in making a shoot/no-shoot decision.

The training of police officers might wish to employ a selection of scenarios that considers the calibration of the fear response. This might involve practicing proportionately fewer scenarios in which a threat is actually present. Additionally, there could be a need to facilitate positive learning such that it modifies the various contextual factors that can influence one's fear response. Such positive experiences could involve aspects of community in addition to training simulations. For example, community engagement including both formal (e.g., organized social gatherings) and informal (e.g., day-to-day social encounters such as door-holding or gestures "good-morning") positive encounters could help with the accurate calibration of the threat response by minimizing the influence of misleading contextual factors. Finally, such calibration through training and community engagement can never be perfectly achieved. In practice, officers can also practice threat regulation strategies such as cognitive reappraisal in potentially threatening situations.

#### CONCLUSION

Though the criticism that traditional judgment and decisionmaking research (focused primarily on simple one-time choices between hypothetical gambles) lacks generalizability to consequential real world decision making has some validity, recent trends have focused on the dynamics of decision making which provide more fidelity with real world decision contexts. We reviewed recent findings that highlight dynamic pre-decisional processes that influence the type of consequential decisions police face in the line of duty. Work by Pleskac et al. (2018),

#### REFERENCES

applying drift diffusion modeling to decision to shoot or not, highlights how bias to shoot is not a singularly straightforward variable, but instead could influence how evidence in favor of a decision is accumulated or how much evidence is needed to make a decision. Likewise, the emerging topic of decisions from experience illustrates that reactions to risk and possible outcomes are strongly influenced by previous decisions made in similar contexts. And the review of the neurocognitive mechanisms of fear adds the insight that these previous experiences may be as subtle as imagined or vicarious scenarios.

While the focus on dynamic processes in decision making is an improvement in terms of generalizability, there is still a long way to go before laboratory-based decision-making researchers can offer concrete prescriptive suggestions for police training and operation. Any worthwhile intervention or policy should be theory driven, which the research above could assist in, but also needs to be empirically tested and validated. Some possibilities drawing from the research reviewed could be increased training of typical police scenarios that have positive outcomes as well as post incident interventions to moderate the neurological conditioning of fear responses with particular contexts.

### AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

JH organized the writing of this manuscript and wrote sections "Introduction," "Decisions From Experience," and "Conclusion." DZ wrote section "Dynamic Accumulation of Evidence in the Decision to Shoot or Not Shoot." SG wrote section "Neurocognitive Influence of Fear on Decision Making."

deprivation on the decision to shoot. *SSRN Electron. J.* 35, 515–524. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.2112514

**Conflict of Interest:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

*Copyright © 2019 Harman, Zhang and Greening. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.*

# Stress-Activity Mapping: Physiological Responses During General Duty Police Encounters

Simon Baldwin1,2 \*, Craig Bennell<sup>1</sup> , Judith P. Andersen<sup>3</sup> , Tori Semple<sup>1</sup> and Bryce Jenkins<sup>1</sup>

<sup>1</sup> Department of Psychology, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada, <sup>2</sup> Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Ottawa, ON, Canada, <sup>3</sup> Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, ON, Canada

Policing is a highly stressful and dangerous profession that involves a complex set of environmental, psychosocial, and health risks. The current study examined autonomic stress responses experienced by 64 police officers, during general duty calls for service (CFS) and interactions with the public. Advancing previous research, this study utilized GPS and detailed operational police records as objective evidence of specific activities throughout a CFS. These data were then used to map officers' heart rate to both the phase of a call (e.g., dispatch, enroute) and incident factors (e.g., call priority, use-of-force). Furthermore, physical movement (i.e., location and inertia) was tracked and assisted in differentiating whether cardiovascular reactivity was due to physical or psychological stress. Officer characteristics, including years of service and training profiles, were examined to conduct a preliminary exploration of whether experience and relevant operational skills training impacted cardiovascular reactivity. Study results provide foundational evidence that CFS factors, specifically the phase of the call (i.e., arrival on scene, encountering a subject) and incident factors (i.e., call priority, weapons, arrest, use-of-force), influence physiological stress responses, which may be associated with short-term performance impairments and long-term health outcomes. Implications of research findings for operational policing, police training, and health research are discussed.

#### Edited by:

Changiz Mohiyeddini, Northeastern University, United States

#### Reviewed by:

Louise Porter, Griffith University, Australia Marie Ottilie Frenkel, Universität Heidelberg, Germany

\*Correspondence: Simon Baldwin<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### Specialty section:

This article was submitted to Health Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 09 April 2019 Accepted: 17 September 2019 Published: 04 October 2019

#### Citation:

Baldwin S, Bennell C, Andersen JP, Semple T and Jenkins B (2019) Stress-Activity Mapping: Physiological Responses During General Duty Police Encounters. Front. Psychol. 10:2216. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02216 Keywords: police, occupational stress, physiological reactivity, heart rate, use-of-force

## INTRODUCTION

Policing is a highly stressful and dangerous profession that involves a complex set of environmental, psychosocial, and health risks (Pinizzotto et al., 2006; Gershon et al., 2009; Chopko and Schwartz, 2012; Violanti, 2014; Andersen et al., 2016a). Against a background of less dangerous tasks, officers are required to respond to violent and life-threatening situations, often encountering novel, ambiguous, and rapidly unfolding events (Fridell and Binder, 1992). It is under these conditions that officers are required to make decisions, sometimes in a split-second, and act to protect the public and themselves (Artwohl, 2002). The current study examines physiological responses experienced by police officers, during general duty calls for service (CFS) and interactions with the public. The aim of the study is to provide novel evidence of how frequently officers experience high physiological stress responses and examine the influence of the phase of the call (e.g., dispatch, enroute) and incident factors (e.g., call priority, use-of-force) on physiological arousal.

The study will also explore whether experience and relevant operational skills training impact cardiovascular reactivity.

When presented with a threatening stimulus (whether real or perceived) the body engages in a series of automatic physiological processes (LeDoux and Pine, 2016). Ledoux and Pine described two pathways to the threat, or "fear" response, more colloquially known as the "fight-or-flight" response. The pathways are: (1) behavioral and physiological stress responses and (2) fearful feelings in higher order cognitive processing. Under elevated levels of stress, the engagement of the first path, automatic physiological processing, happens within sub-cortical structures of the brain's limbic system. The second path engages higher order cortical cognitive processing, generating conscious feelings, such as fear or other related emotions, in response to a threat (Fenici et al., 2011; LeDoux and Pine, 2016). The fight-or-flight response is implicit (i.e., below conscious awareness) and is the default human response to threat in order to maximize survival by immediately preparing the body to fight or flee without the need for higher-order cognitive processing (Thayer and Sternberg, 2006; LeDoux and Pine, 2016).

During the fight-or-flight response, two central physiological processes are engaged to mobilize the body to meet the demands of the situation and suppress unnecessary functions (e.g., reproduction, growth; McEwen, 1998; Kemeny, 2003). As described in detail by McEwen (1998) and Lovallo (2016), the sympatho-adrenal response results in a wide-spread, powerful reaction, which includes the release of neurotransmitters and hormones. The other physiological process is the engagement of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which is made up of two branches – the sympathetic (SNS) and parasympathetic (PNS) divisions.