AMBER Alerts and their effectiveness.

Abstract

Do AMBER Alert messages encourage people to become more face-vigilant? Face-vigilance was measured through a recognition task that instructed participants to search for discrepant faces in friendly, threatening, and neutral crowds. Participants were primed with either an AMBER Alert message or a nonword message (i.e., letters that resembled a real word; e.g., SHUM and LAIP), and then instructed to quickly and accurately conclude whether a discrepant face was present in a matrix of faces. Each participant's performance was measured as the response time for correct responses. The study analyzed data to see whether participants in the AMBER Alert group were able to correctly identify threatening faces faster than participants in the nonword group. Overall, the results confirmed the hypothesis that threatening faces in friendly crowds were more quickly and accurately detected than were friendly faces in threatening crowds. Unfortunately, the results did not show a significant difference in response times (RTs) for correct responses between the AMBER Alert group and the nonword group. As a result, our findings did not support the hypothesis that AMBER Alerts encourage people to become more face-vigilant. Therefore, we were unable to conclude that the AMBER Alert program does in fact galvanize the entire community to assist in the search for and safe recovery of the child.