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

Marien Gadea,Raúl Espert,Marta Aliño,Alicia Salvador

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01089

Abstract

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.

Highlights

The present study fits in the general background of the need to identify valid indicators of deceptive behavior and/or find measures that validly discriminate between liars and truth-tellers
In the light on the outcome of the present experiment, our detectors were quite successful in determining the children’s truths and lies, since the classification was correct in 66.5%, significantly above from the standard 50–54% accuracy level (Bond and DePaulo, 2006), without significant differences between the detection of true or false videos, and with a moderately good overall index of discriminability
Some contextual variations of the task, like pressing the children to consider the moral implications of deceit or to promise to be honest before the task can facilitate the subsequent deception detection above chance (Leach et al, 2004)

Summary

Introduction

The present study fits in the general background of the need to identify valid indicators of deceptive behavior and/or find measures that validly discriminate between liars and truth-tellers. The studies show that when adults attempt to differentiate children’s deceptive behavior, including parents, child protection lawyers, police and social workers, and judges, are highly inaccurate and rarely perform above chance levels (Crossman and Lewis, 2006; Eldestein et al, 2006). This fact has been partially explained by some authors by referring to the observed behavior of children when they lie, closely mimicked from subjects who are telling the truth (e.g., to make direct eye contact, Talwar and Lee, 2002)

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