Emily and Laurice Alison are psychologists, who help counter-terrorism officers and the police in communicating and co-operating with criminal suspects, as well as extracting information out of them. Their methods are effective in two things: interrogating criminal suspects, and surprisingly, in making relationships at home better.
For the couple – who’ve been married for 21 years and have a 16-year-old son – the parallels with parenting have long been obvious and were underlined by the response of officers they’ve encountered on the intensive courses they run on how to interrogate terrorists.
Time after time, participants fed back that as well as learning invaluable skills for their professional lives, their approach was helping them deal with family and work relationships. “We were fascinated,” says Laurence, director of the Centre for Critical and Major Incident Psychology at Liverpool University. “We’d do a day on the best way to extract information from a dangerous prisoner and at the end of it participants would say, ‘This is such useful advice for me as a parent of teenagers.’”
What’s the secret ingredient to their effective communication? Find out over at The Guardian.
(Image Credit: Shaw & Shaw/The Observer/ The Guardian)