Mirror, mirror on the wall: Increasing young children’s honesty through inducing self-awareness

Infant-parent attachment and lie-telling in young children: The Generation R Study

Insecure-attached adults are more likely to lie. However, it is unknown whether infant-parent attachment quality relates to lie-telling in early childhood. As in adults, lie-telling in early childhood might be related to attachment insecurity. However, a competing hypothesis might be plausible; lie-telling might be related to attachment security given that lie-telling in early childhood is considered an advancement in social-cognitive development. The current study is the first to investigate the link between insecure/secure and disorganized/non-disorganized attachment and lie-telling behavior in early childhood. Because lie-telling is studied in the context of cheating behavior, the association between cheating and attachment is additionally explored. A total of 560 Dutch children (287 girls) from a longitudinal cohort study (Generation R) were included in the analyses. Attachment quality with primary caregiver (secure/insecure and disorganized/non-disorganized attachment) was assessed at 14 months of age in the Strange Situation Procedure, and cheating and lie-telling were observed in games administered at 4 years of age. The results demonstrated no relationship of attachment (in)security and (dis)organization with cheating and lie-telling. Results are interpreted in light of evidence that lie-telling in early childhood is part of normative development. Limitations are discussed, including the time lag between assessments, the fact that lie-telling was measured toward a researcher instead of a caregiver, and the conceptualization of attachment in infancy versus adulthood. Attachment quality does not affect early normative lie-telling, but how and when it may affect later lying in children remains to be explored.

Cognitive empathy boosts honesty in children and young adolescents

Children and young adolescents often tend to behave dishonestly in order to serve their self-interests. This study focused on how empathic abilities affect children's tendency to deceive others. Deception is the act of causing others to form a false belief to get them to act in a way that serves the deceiver's interests. As such, it requires the ability to predict how others might use the provided information. In two experiments, 274 participants (aged 10-16 years) played a game in which they could send a deceptive message to another participant to boost their own payoff at the other player's expense. We measured participants' cognitive and emotional empathy using different measures. We found that a measure of cognitive empathy, namely the fantasy scale, was associated with less deception of another player when that other player was not identified and was presented only as "Player B." However, when Player B was identified by name, empathy did not predict deception. In such cases, the only factors affecting deception rates were the gain for the participant (higher possible gains lead to more deception) and loss to the other player (higher possible losses lead to less deception). Overall, the findings suggest that even by 11 years of age, children can understand the impact of their unethical behavior on another child and adjust their actions accordingly. However, when the other child is not identified, children need to possess high levels of cognitive empathy toward imagined individuals to resist the temptation to deceive the other child.

Postoperative health-related quality of life in children with congenital heart disease: a short-term follow-up study

OBJECTIVE

This study aimed to explore changes in health-related quality of life in children with congenital heart disease from pre-surgery to 6 months after surgery.

METHODS

A total of 87 children aged 2-12 years who underwent cardiac surgery in a provincial hospital in China from January 2021 to June 2021 were selected. After 6 months, the quality of life of all children was retrospectively analyzed. The Chinese version of the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory 4.0 Scale was used to assess the quality of life of children before and after surgery.

RESULTS

Parents of 85 children and 33 children aged 5-12 years completed the questionnaires. After surgical treatment, the quality of life scores reported by parents of children of all ages were significantly higher than those before surgery, the P value < 0.05; the self-evaluated quality of life scores of children of different ages were significantly higher than those before surgery, the P value < 0.05.

CONCLUSION

Surgical treatment can improve the health-related quality of life of children with congenital heart disease.

Self-awareness protects working memory in people under chronic stress: An ERP study

Chronic stress impairs working memory (WM), but few studies have explored the protective factors of the impairment. We aimed to investigate the effect of self-awareness on WM processing in people under chronic stress. Participants under chronic stress completed an n-back task after a self-awareness priming paradigm during which electroencephalograms were recorded. The behavioral results showed that participants whose self-awareness was primed reacted faster and more accurately than the controls. Event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed the following (1) P2 was more positive in the self-awareness group than in the controls, indicating that self-awareness enhanced allocation of attention resources at the encoding stage. (2) N2 was attenuated in the self-awareness group compared with the controls, indicating that smaller attention control efforts were required to complete WM tasks adequately after self-awareness priming; and (3) enhanced late positive potential (LPP) was evoked in the self-awareness group compared with the controls, suggesting self-awareness enabled participants to focus attention resources on the information at the maintenance stage. Critically, mediational analyses showed that LPP mediated the relationship between self-awareness and WM response times. This result suggests that the fact that participants whose self-awareness was primed were able to achieve better behavioral performances may be attributed to their mobilization of sustained attention resources at the maintenance stage. In summary, self-awareness exerted a protective effect on WM in those under chronic stress, which may be due to the enhancements in the allocation and mobilization of attention. These results could be used to develop more specific coping strategies for people under chronic stress.

Young Children Selectively Hide the Truth About Sensitive Topics

Starting in early childhood, children are socialized to be honest. However, they are also expected to avoid telling the truth in sensitive situations if doing so could be seen as inappropriate or impolite. Across two studies (total N = 358), the reasoning of 3- to 5-year-old children in such a scenario was investigated by manipulating whether the information in question would be helpful to the recipient. The studies used a reverse rouge paradigm, in which a confederate with a highly salient red mark on her nose asked children whether she looked okay prior to having her picture taken. In Study 1, children tended to tell the truth only if they were able to observe that the mark was temporary and the confederate did not know it was there. In Study 2, children tended to tell the truth only if they were able to observe that the mark could be concealed with makeup. These findings show that for children as young as age 3, decisions about whether to tell the truth are influenced by the likelihood that the information would be helpful to the recipient.

Functional connectivity between the caudate and medial prefrontal cortex reflects individual honesty variations in adults and children

Deception emerges in early childhood and prevails in adults. Activation patterns in previous adults' task-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), though sensitive to state honesty on a specific decision, are less reliable reflecting trait honesty. Besides of state honesty, most previous neuroimaging studies about dishonesty suffer the generalization problem due to the major focus on adults with children unexplored. To investigate honesty associated functional brain networks variations, 98 healthy adults (Age: 18-28 y.o.; 49 males and 49 females) were invited to participate in a resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rfMRI) study (Study 1). We investigated how functional connections between the caudate and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) change among adults who differ in self-reported trait honesty. Results showed that adults with higher trait honesty have increased functional connectivity from the caudate to the mPFC, which is identified as an honesty-related hub region in global brain connectivity analysis and connects more tightly to a wide range of brain regions including the amygdala. Study 2 compared functional connectivity between children with high vs. low lying frequencies (Age: 6-16 y.o.; 61 males and 39 females) based on a publicly accessible database of rfMRI. Consistent with findings in adults, increased functional connectivity from the caudate to the mPFC was found in less frequently lying children. Despite different honesty indicators of self-reported honesty trait in adults and parent-reported lying patterns in children, consistent findings have been noted in the two samples with regards to functional connectivity variations between reward-related and self-related brain regions. These findings suggest functional connectivity alterations between the caudate and the mPFC contribute to honesty variations in both adults and children.

Increasing maltreated and nonmaltreated children's recall disclosures of a minor transgression: The effects of back-channel utterances, a promise to tell the truth, and a post-recall putative confession

BACKGROUND

Children are often hesitant to disclose transgressions, particularly when they feel implicated, and frequently remain reluctant until confronted with direct questions. Given the risks associated with direct questions, an important issue is how interviewers can encourage honesty through recall questions.

OBJECTIVE

The present study examined the use of three truth induction strategies for increasing the accuracy and productivity of children's reports about a transgression.

PARTICIPANTS

A total of 285 4-to-9-year-old maltreated and nonmaltreated children.

METHODS

Each child took part in a play session with a stranger during which the child appeared to break some toys. A research assistant interviewed the child with narrative practice rapport building and recall questions. The study included manipulations of back-channel utterances (brief expressions used to communicate attention and interest), whether (and when) the child was asked to promise to tell the truth, and the use of a post-recall putative confession.

RESULTS

Back-channel utterances failed to increase disclosure (OR = 0.79 [95% CI: 0.48, 1.31]) but increased the productivity of children's reports about broken (p = 0.04, η_p = 0.02) and unbroken toys (p = 0.004, η_p = 0.03). A promise to tell the truth significantly increased children's disclosures, but only among nonmaltreated children (OR = 3.65 [95% CI: 1.23, 10.90]). The post-recall putative confession elicited new disclosures from about half of children who had failed to disclose.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings highlight the difficulties of eliciting honest responses from children about suspected transgressions and the need for flexible questioning strategies.

Self-awareness buffers the consequences of negative feedback: Evidence from an ERP study

Previous studies have found that self-awareness can help people to recruit more cognitive resources, while people with more cognitive resources can better buffer the detrimental effects of negative events. However, it is not clear whether self-awareness can directly buffer the consequences of negative feedback (i.e., reducing neural sensitivity to negative feedback). To explore this issue, we used a scrambled sentence task (SST) to manipulate participants' self-awareness (self vs. other) and investigated whether outcome evaluations in a gambling task are modulated by the self-awareness priming. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while 27 normal adults performed a gambling task. The ERP analysis focused on the feedback-related negativity (FRN), reward positivity (RewP) and P300 component. We found that the self-awareness priming resulted in a smaller FRN response to the losses compared with the other-awareness priming. There was no significant difference in the RewP response to wins between the self-awareness condition and the other-awareness condition. We also found that the self-awareness condition evoked larger P300 amplitude than the other-awareness condition. The present findings suggest that self-awareness can help people to cope with negative feedback in the early semiautomatic outcome evaluation stage (i.e., reducing neural sensitivity to negative feedback) and enhance top-down evaluation to both positive and negative feedback in the late and deliberate stage, providing direct evidence of the adaptive function of self-awareness on outcome experience.

The Mirror Effect: A Preregistered Replication

When individuals are exposed to their own image in a mirror, known to increase self-awareness, they may show increased accessibility of suicide-related words (a phenomenon labeled “the mirror effect”; Selimbegović & Chatard, 2013). We attempted to replicate this effect in a pre-registered study (N = 150). As in the original study, self-awareness was manipulated using a mirror and recognition latencies for accurately detecting suicide-related words, negative words, and neutral words in a lexical decision task were assessed. We found no evidence of the mirror effect in pre-registered analyses. A multiverse analysis revealed a significant mirror effect only when excluding extreme observations. An equivalence TOST test did not yield evidence for or against the mirror effect. Overall, the results suggest that the original effect was a false positive or that the conditions for obtaining it (in terms of statistical power and/or outlier detection method) are not yet fully understood. Implications for the mirror effect and recommendations for pre-registered replications are discussed.

THE STUDY OF EDUCATIONAL HONESTY STAGES IMPLEMENTATION IN AN INDONESIAN SCHOOL

Purpose of the study: This study aims to develop an honesty model of education in a school, especially to convey the stages, facilities, and infrastructure needed to carry out honesty education in a school. Methodology: This study used a qualitative method in a case study approach. Data collection was conducted in five ways, namely direct observation, observer as a participant, interviews, documentation, Soft and physical Devices The numbers of the participant were 29 teachers and 40 students. Activities in qualitative data analysis are carried out interactively and continuously and are holistic in nature. Therefore data analysis this study uses 3 steps to analyze research data. first, data reduction. Second, display data, the third is conclusion drawing or verification. Main Findings: The results of this research show that honesty culture can be implemented with a strong school system and with stages clearly. Applications of this study: This study can be useful in moral education or character building for students in a school Novelty/Originality of this study: The process of implementing honesty culture takes place through 4 stages. The first is protection, the second introduction, the third habituation inside and outside the classroom, and the fourth celebrations. The school compiles programs, policies and provides facilities and infrastructure that are oriented to the formation of an honesty culture for students and for all school members.

The effects of the putative confession and evidence presentation on maltreated and non-maltreated 9- to 12-year-olds' disclosures of a minor transgression

The current study examined the influence of the putative confession (in which children are told that the suspect told them "everything that happened" and "wants [the child] to tell the truth") and evidence presentation on 9- to 12-year-old maltreated and non-maltreated children's disclosure (N = 321). Half of the children played a forbidden game with an adult confederate that resulted in a laptop computer breaking (no transgression occurred for the other half of the children), followed by coaching to conceal the forbidden game and to falsely disclose the sanctioned game. Children were then interviewed about the interaction with the confederate. Among the 9- and 10-year-olds, the putative confession led to a higher rate of breakage disclosure (62%) than the control condition (13%) and to a higher rate of leakage of incriminating details during recall (47% vs. 9%). Older children were more likely to disclose than younger children and to be uninfluenced by the putative confession. Among all ages, evidence presentation elicited disclosures from 63% of children who had not previously disclosed without eliciting any false disclosures.

Cheating behavior in children: Integrating gaze allocation and social awareness

Children's cheating and factors supporting honesty are not well understood. The current work explored variables involved in children's cheating through eye-tracking and an implicit manipulation in which extrinsic awareness of the effects of one's behaviors on others was primed. Participants played a computer game with the option for a monetary gain in which they could earn more if they selectively erred in response to more profitable stimuli. Results show that children cheat by making selective effort toward more profitable errors; however, extrinsic awareness inhibits these cheating behaviors. Importantly, gaze toward children's earnings mediates this relationship, suggesting that extrinsic awareness mitigates an impulsive looking pattern, which in turn results in less cheating. Findings suggest that an implicit manipulation, highlighting the potential implications of one's actions for others, seems to effectively suppress cheating among children. Furthermore, attention toward earnings offers a cognitive process that acts to mediate the effect of this manipulation on cheating. Taken together, this framework suggests psychoneurocognitive and social processes that influence cheating in children, offering a direction for future implicit intervention techniques to support honest performance.