How Children Report True and Fabricated Stressful and Non-Stressful Events

Maltreated and non-maltreated children's truthful and dishonest reports: Linguistic and syntactic differences

Introduction

Adults are typically poor judges of the veracity of statements, requiring the need for alternative methods for detecting lies. One alternative method to human lie-detectors is using computer-based linguistic analysis which may present a more reliable method for detecting dishonesty. Moreover, while previous research has examined linguistic differences between typically developing children's and adults' truthful and dishonest reports, no study to date has examined whether maltreated children exhibit different linguistic cues to dishonesty. Thus, the current study examined maltreated and nonmaltreated children's linguistic and syntactic cues to children's truthful and dishonest reports.

Methods

Nine- to 12-year-olds, half of whom were maltreated, played a computer game with a confederate: half of the children experienced a transgression (i.e., playing a forbidden game and crashing the computer) and were coached to conceal it, and half of the children experienced no transgression (i.e., simply played a computer game). All children were then interviewed about the event. The current study utilized automated linguistic and syntactic analysis software to compare children's truthful reports (no transgression occurred) with dishonest reports.

Results and Discussion

Results indicated that maltreated and non-maltreated children did not differ in their indicators of dishonesty. Dishonest reporters used more first-person plural pronouns and cognitive mechanism terms and had less syntactically complex reports compared to truthful reporters. Finally, first-personal plural pronouns, cognitive mechanism terms, and syntactic complexity accurately classified (74.2%) the veracity of children's reports. The current findings present a new indicator of dishonesty (syntactic complexity) and suggest that indicators from typically developing populations may apply to maltreated children when coaching occurred.

Children who are coached to lie: does linguistic analysis help in understanding why these children are so believable?

In this study, the usefulness of linguistic analysis in determining the veracity of children's accounts is examined. The Linguistic Inquiry Word Count 2007 program was used to analyze 95 stories told by 5- to 14-year-olds who were telling the truth or a lie about the stressful experience of breaking a bone or requiring sutures for serious lacerations. Half of the children were coached by parents in preparing their story over the four days prior to giving their account. Differences emerged in the linguistic style used as a function of age, presence of coaching and event veracity. Very few linguistic categories emerged as significant predictors of event veracity, and the variables that did emerge were different depending upon the presence of coaching. Since in real-life situations one seldom knows a child's coaching history, these findings suggest that it is inappropriate to use linguistic analysis to assess the veracity of children's accounts.

Does parental coaching affect children's false reports? Comparing verbal markers of deception

The present study examined differences in children's true and false narratives as a function of parental coaching by comparing the verbal markers associated with deception. Children (N = 65, 4-7 years old) played the same game with an adult stranger over three consecutive days. Parents coached their children to falsely allege that they had played a second game and to generate details for the fabricated event. One week after the last play session, children were interviewed about their experiences. For children with the least amount of parental coaching, true and false reports could be distinguished by multiple verbal markers of deception (e.g., cognitive processes, temporal information, self-references). The fabricated reports of children who spent more time being coaching by a parent resembled their truthful reports. These findings have implications for real-world forensic contexts when children have been coached to make false allegations and fabricate information at the behest of a parent.

Pain catastrophizing predicts verbal expression among children with chronic pain and their mothers

This study examined intra- and inter-personal associations between pain catastrophizing and verbal expression in 70 children with recurrent abdominal pain and their mothers. Participants independently completed the Pain Catastrophizing Scale. Mothers and children then talked about the child’s pain. Speech was categorized using a linguistic analysis program. Catastrophizing was positively associated with the use of negative emotion words by both mothers and children. In addition, mothers’ catastrophizing was positively associated with both mothers’ and children’s anger word usage, whereas children’s catastrophizing was inversely associated with mothers’ anger word usage. Findings extend the literature on behavioral and interpersonal aspects of catastrophizing.

Adults' Detection of Deception in Children: Effect of Coaching and Age for Children's True and Fabricated Reports of Injuries

A total of 1,074 undergraduates judged the truthfulness of children's interviews (from verbatim transcripts) about experiencing injuries serious enough to require hospital emergency room treatment. Ninety-six children (three age groups: 5-7, 8-10, and 11-14 years, 50% girls) were interviewed. At each age, 16 children told truthful accounts of actual injury experiences and 16 fabricated their reports, with half of each group coached by parents for the previous 4 days. Lies by 5- to 7-year-olds, whether coached or not, were detected at above-chance levels. In contrast, 8- to 10-year-olds' accounts that were coached, whether true or not, were more likely to be believed. For 11- to 14-year-olds, adults were less likely to accurately judge lies if they were coached. The believability of children aged 8 or above who were coached to lie is particularly disturbing in light of the finding that participants were more confident in the accuracy of their veracity decisions when judging coached reports.

Deceit and facial expression in children: the enabling role of the "poker face" child and the dependent personality of the detector

This study presents the relation between the facial expression of a group of children when they told a lie and the accuracy in detecting the lie by a sample of adults. To evaluate the intensity and type of emotional content of the children's faces, we applied an automated method capable of analyzing the facial information from the video recordings (FaceReader 5.0 software). The program classified videos as showing a neutral facial expression or an emotional one. There was a significant higher mean of hits for the emotional than for the neutral videos, and a significant negative correlation between the intensity of the neutral expression and the number of hits from the detectors. The lies expressed with emotional facial expression were more easily recognized by adults than the lies expressed with a "poker face"; thus, the less expressive the child the harder it was to guess. The accuracy of the lie detectors was then correlated with their subclinical traits of personality disorders, to find that participants scoring higher in the dependent personality were significantly better lie detectors. A non-significant tendency for women to discriminate better was also found, whereas men tended to be more suspicious than women when judging the children's veracity. This study is the first to automatically decode the facial information of the lying child and relate these results with personality characteristics of the lie detectors in the context of deceptive behavior research. Implications for forensic psychology were suggested: to explore whether the induction of an emotion in a child during an interview could be useful to evaluate the testimony during legal trials.

Are Computers Effective Lie Detectors? A Meta-Analysis of Linguistic Cues to Deception

This meta-analysis investigates linguistic cues to deception and whether these cues can be detected with computer programs. We integrated operational definitions for 79 cues from 44 studies where software had been used to identify linguistic deception cues. These cues were allocated to six research questions. As expected, the meta-analyses demonstrated that, relative to truth-tellers, liars experienced greater cognitive load, expressed more negative emotions, distanced themselves more from events, expressed fewer sensory–perceptual words, and referred less often to cognitive processes. However, liars were not more uncertain than truth-tellers. These effects were moderated by event type, involvement, emotional valence, intensity of interaction, motivation, and other moderators. Although the overall effect size was small, theory-driven predictions for certain cues received support. These findings not only further our knowledge about the usefulness of linguistic cues to detect deception with computers in applied settings but also elucidate the relationship between language and deception.