Summary: There are large individual differences in the ability to recognise faces. Super-recognisers are exceptionally good at face memory tasks. In London, a small specialist pool of police officers (also labelled 'super-recognisers' by the Metropolitan Police Service) annually makes 1000's of suspect identifications from closed-circuit television footage. Some suspects are disguised, have not been encountered recently or are depicted in poor quality images. Across tests measuring familiar face recognition, unfamiliar face memory and unfamiliar face matching, the accuracy of members of this specialist police pool was approximately equal to a group of non-police super-recognisers. Both groups were more accurate than matched control members of the public. No reliable relationships were found between the face processing tests and object recognition. Within each group, however, there were large performance variations across tests, and this research has implications for the deployment of police worldwide in operations requiring officers with superior face processing ability

A 27-item questionnaire adapted from Bieber et al. was administered to 43 homosexual and 142 heterosexual men in order to determine whether certain items which Bieber et al. had reported as differentiating homosexual and heterosexual males who were in psychotherapy would also differentiate similar groups who had never sought psychotherapy. The data were based on retrospective self-reports regarding childhood fears and activities, and interparental and parent-child relationships. In the Bieber study, each patient's psychoanalyst completed the questionnaire, so that their data were based on analysts' reconstructions of patients' early lives. The present results were remarkably similar to those of Bieber et al. in revealing more "negative" features in the backgrounds of the homosexuals. Nevertheless, the results were considered neither to support nor refute the Bieber conclusions regarding the etiological importance of parental relationships in homosexuality.

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