Detecting children's true and false denials of wrongdoing: Effects of question type and base rate knowledge

Discernment of Children's True and False Memory Reports: Police Officers and Laypersons

Adults' ability to accurately evaluate children's statements can have far-reaching consequences within the legal system. This study examined the evaluations of police officers ("experts") and laypersons ("nonexperts") when presented with videotaped interviews of children aged 3 and 5 years who provided either true or false reports or denials. Participants were drawn from several counties in the eastern United States. Children's interview statements fell within four statement types: accurate reports, false reports, accurate denials, and false denials. Both groups of participants displayed overbelief in false denials. Several control variables predicted accuracy, including children's age and children's race. A significant interaction emerged: Experts (vs. nonexperts) had greater odds of being accurate when judging false reports (vs. false denials). These findings highlight the challenges adults face when distinguishing between various types of children's statements. The results have important implications for legal contexts, emphasizing that fact finders need to be mindful of the risks associated with both overaccepting false denials and accepting false reports.

Reliability of the Sexual Knowledge Picture Instrument: a potential diagnostic instrument for sexual abuse in young children

OBJECTIVE

To determine the intra-rater and inter-rater reliability of the Sexual Knowledge Picture Instrument (SKPI), a potential diagnostic instrument for young suspected victims of sexual abuse containing three scoring forms, that is, verbal responses, non-verbal reactions and red flags.

DESIGN

Video-recorded SKPI interviews with children with and without suspicion of child sexual abuse were observed and scored by two trained, independent raters. The second rater repeated the assessment 6 weeks after initial rating to evaluate for intra-rater reliability.

SUBJECTS

78 children aged 3-9 years old were included in the study. 39 of those included had known suspicion of sexual abuse and the other 39 had no suspicion.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES

Intra-rater and inter-rater reliability of the scores per study group and in the total sample were assessed by Cohen's kappa and percentage of agreement (POA).

RESULTS

The median intra-rater Cohen's kappa exceeded 0.90 and the POA exceeded 95 for all three forms in both study groups, except for the red flag form (median Cohen's kappa 0.54 and POA 87 in the suspected group, and 0.84 and 92, respectively, in the total sample). For the verbal scoring form the median inter-rater Cohen's kappa and POA were 1.00 and 100, respectively, in both groups. For the non-verbal form the median inter-rater kappa and POA were 0.37 and 97, respectively, in the suspected group, and 0.47 and 100, respectively, in the control group. For the red flag form, they were 0.37 and 76, respectively, in the suspected group and 0.42 and 77, respectively, in the control group.

CONCLUSION

The reliability of the SKPI verbal form was sufficient, but there is room for improvement in the non-verbal and red flag scoring forms. These forms may be improved by adjusting the manual and improving rater training.

Causal Indicators for Assessing the Truthfulness of Child Speech in Forensic Interviews

When interviewing a child who may have witnessed a crime, the interviewer must ask carefully directed questions in order to elicit a truthful statement from the child. The presented work uses Granger causal analysis to examine and represent child-interviewer interaction dynamics over such an interview. Our work demonstrates that Granger Causal analysis of psycholinguistic and acoustic signals from speech yields significant predictors of whether a child is telling the truth, as well as whether a child will disclose witnessing a transgression later in the interview. By incorporating cross-modal Granger causal features extracted from audio and transcripts of forensic interviews, we are able to substantially outperform conventional deception detection methods and a number of simulated baselines. Our results suggest that a child's use of concreteness and imageability in their language are strong psycholinguistic indicators of truth-telling and that the coordination of child and interviewer speech signals is much more informative than the specific language used throughout the interview.