Professor Coral Dando

Professor Coral Dando is a Professor of Forensic Psychology, a British Psychological Society Chartered Scientist, a Chartered Psychologist, and a Consultant Forensic Psychologist. Having served as a London police officer, her research and professional practice are heavily influenced by the real-world challenges of national and international security and criminal investigation. She is involved in developing and training professionals to apply psychologically informed ‘usable’ techniques for supporting adult and child witnesses and victims of crime to remember and recount their experiences and maximising opportunities to detect truth and lies in dynamic, real world security contexts. Coral’s research is funded by the UK and US governments, and she has worked extensively with UK and EU police, charities and NGOs, and security organisations worldwide, including Emirates Group Security, US Transport Security Administration, US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and International Criminal Court (The Hague). Dr Coral has written more than 100 peer-reviewed international scientific journal articles and book chapters and regularly writes for newspapers and media outlets.

  • Professor Coral Dando recently discussed how psychology has been instrumental in improving witness interview practices at the British Psychological Society, emphasizing rapport building to enhance eyewitness memory.

    Additionally, she shared her research on eyewitness accuracy, revealing that virtual reality avatars improve recall over human interviews, on the "All in the Mind" program.

  • Professor Coral's research is focused on real-world challenges of national and international security and criminal investigations.

  • Buchanan, T., Maras, K., & Dando, C. (2025). Individual differences in detecting and sharing misinformation: Positive schizotypy, conspiracy beliefs, and autism. Personality and Individual Differences, 233, Article 112946. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2024.112946

    Taylor, D. A., & Dando, C. J. (2024). Eyewitness memory for person, object and action information is mediated by interview environment and the presence or absence of rapport. Journal of Criminal Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCP-07-2024-0057

    Dando, C. J., Sandham, A. L., Sibbons, C., & Taylor, P. J. (2024). Arabic within culture forensic interviews: Arabic native speaking lay-observer truth and lie accuracy, confidence, and verbal cue selection. PLoS ONE, 19(9), Article e0310384. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0310384

    Caso, A., Gabbert, F., & Dando, C. J. (2024). Eyewitness confidence in the interviewing context: Understanding the impact of question type and order. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 38(3), Article e4197. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.4197

    Widanaralalage, B. K., Jennings, S., Dando, C., & Mackenzie, J. M. (2024). Prevalence, disclosure, and help seeking in Black and Asian male survivors of sexual violence in the United Kingdom: A rapid review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 25(4), 3299-3314. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380241246217

    Dando, C., Jones, A., Harvey, N., & Milne, R. (2024). Orochi impact formula: An evidence-based approach for quantifying the societal harm of county lines drug supply. The Police Journal, 0(0), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032258X241239017

    Widanaralalage, B. K., Jennings, S., Dando, C., & Mackenzie, J. M. (2024). ‘We don’t talk about that around here’: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) of South Asian men’s experiences of sexual violence in the UK. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-3955979/v1

    Dando, C. J., Taylor, P. J., Menacere, T., Ormerod, T. C., Ball, L. J., & Sandham, A. L. (2024). Sorting insiders from co-workers: Remote synchronous computer-mediated triage for investigating insider attacks. Human Factors, 66(1), 145-157. https://doi.org/10.1177/00187208211068292

    Dando, C. J., Nahouli, Z., Hart, A., & Pounder, Z. (2023). Real-world implications of aphantasia: Episodic recall of eyewitnesses with aphantasia is less complete but no less accurate than typical imagers. Royal Society Open Science, 10(10), Article 231007. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.231007

    Nahouli, Z., Mackenzie, J. M., Aresti, A., & Dando, C. (2023). Rapport building with offenders in probation supervision: The views of English probation practitioners. Probation Journal, 70(2), 104-123. https://doi.org/10.1177/02645505221137448

    Dando, C. J., Ormerod, T. C., & Atkinson-Sheppard, S. (2023). Parental experiences of the impact of grooming and criminal exploitation of children for County Lines drug trafficking. Journal of Public Health, 45(2), e346-e354. https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdac112

    Dando, C. J., Taylor, P. J., & Sandham, A. L. (2023). Cross cultural verbal cues to deception: Truth and lies in first and second language forensic interview contexts. Front. Psychol., 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1152904

    Atkinson-Sheppard, S., Dando, C., Ormerod, T., & Robinson, B. (2023). Coercion and crime: Convergences, divergences and ‘County Lines’. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 0(0), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1177/17488958231153981

    Dando, C., Taylor, D. A., Caso, A., Nahouli, Z., & Adam, C. (2023). Interviewing in virtual environments: Towards understanding the impact of rapport-building behaviours and retrieval context on eyewitness memory. Memory & Cognition, 51(2), 404-421. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-022-01362-7