Emotional typecasting of emergency callers may mislead investigations

We've all had a 'hunch' that something isn't quite right — a student seeming unusually anxious in a test, someone looking around nervously in a supermarket, or a partner keeping an unusually tight grip on their phone. Such behaviours can all arouse suspicion, especially if they seem out of place.

What types of action are likely to trigger suspicions of wrongdoing is the focus of a new study led by Jessica Salerno and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition. Across four studies, using real and simulated 911 calls, Salerno and her team find that when people don't display strong emotions during a traumatic event, others are more likely to suspect them of wrongdoing — or even of committing a crime.

In the first study, 943 participants listened to one of twelve real 911 call recordings. These featured either a male or female voice, who expressed with low, moderate, or high emotion that either their parents or a stranger had been shot. Participants were asked to imagine that some callers might be involved in the crime. After listening to each call at least three times, they rated how suspicious the caller seemed and whether the police should treat them as a suspect.

Callers who expressed low emotion were consistently rated as significantly more suspicious than those with moderate or high emotion. Gender expectations also played a role: women who showed low emotion (thereby violating stereotypical expectations of expressiveness) and men showing high emotion (violating their stereotypical image of restraint), were seen as particularly suspicious.

This judgement led to participants being more likely to endorse the police investigating callers they deemed lacking appropriate emotion for wrongdoing. In other words, suspicion wasn't based solely on what was said, but how well the caller's emotional reaction fit stereotypes around grief and gender.

The second study used actors reading a script about a spouse being shot, varying only in the emotional intensity of their delivery. The 624 participants then completed the same measures as in the first study, as well as indicating how much the caller had violated their expectations, whether they felt the caller was capable of doing immoral things, and how vulnerable the caller seemed.

As in the first study, callers who expressed low emotion were rated significantly more suspicious than those expressing moderate or high emotion (this time regardless of gender). Not only that, but these callers were also seen as violating expectations, more capable of immoral behavior, and less like victims.

This pattern held even among trained professionals. In a follow-up study involving police officers, low-emotion callers were once again viewed with greater suspicion — this time along with moderate-emotion ones. Police officers were also significantly more suspicious of male callers than female ones, highlighting the potential for biases within law enforcement to actively shape investigations. Future research could explore this with other facets of identity, like race or sexuality.

The study suggests, overall, that failing to express the "right" level of emotion in a crisis can put someone at risk of being judged as morally suspect, even if they're totally innocent. This has serious implications, particularly for people who process trauma, or express emotion, differently; those who are neurodivergent, have brain injuries or paralysis, and other conditions affecting the way emotions are processed, felt, and conveyed might be particularly affected by such assumptions.

This finding raises some concerning possibilities: if an innocent witness to a crime doesn't express emotions 'appropriately', they may be more likely to be identified as a suspect in the case of foul play, and could even end up wrongly convicted for a crime. As the authors note, "This situation is even more urgent due to recent discoveries that police are being trained in a new frontier of junk science called "911 Call Analysis", in which a former officer provides a set of guilt/innocence indicators that he claims can enable police to identify 911 callers who committed murders they reported based only on their linguistic behaviour on the call — including things like perceived emotionality and urgency." Further work is clearly needed to mitigate this issue, both in training and practice.

Read the paper in full:
Salerno, J. M., Bean, S. R., Duran, N. D., Wulff, A. N., Reeder, I., & Kassin, S. M. (2025). Failing to express emotion on 911 calls triggers suspicion through violating expectations and moral typecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 128(4), 765–789. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000412

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