Children False Reports Research Articles

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, 4-7years 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.

‘Look This Way’: Using Gaze Maintenance to Facilitate the Detection of Children's False Reports

SummaryIn two experiments, we investigated whether imposing a secondary task is an effective technique for detecting child deceit. First, 85 children aged 8 to 11 years old provided either a true or false report of a recent school event. At interview, some children were asked to gaze towards either the interviewer's face (IF) or a teddy bear's face (TF), whereas some children were given no gaze instruction. In both the IF and TF conditions, lie‐tellers provided significantly fewer details than truth‐tellers. A total of 192 adult evaluators then judged the credibility of 10 children's reports from one of the three ‘gaze’ conditions with and without guidance on level of detail. Evaluators discriminated truths from lies successfully when judging children instructed to look at IF, but not when children were asked to gaze towards TF. Evaluators who received guidance demonstrated better discrimination between true and false reports than evaluators who received no such information. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

High Cognitive Load During Cross-Examination: Does It Improve Detection of Children's Truths and Lies?

The current study used a high cognitive load cross-examination procedure to determine whether this would improve undergraduate students’ ability to detect deception in children aged 9 to 12 years. The participants (n = 88) were asked to determine whether children's accounts of an event included a true denial, false denial, true assertion or false assertion about a game played during a home visit occurring one week prior. Overall, the high cognitive load cross-examination did not improve detection rates, in that participants were at chance level for both direct examination (49.4%) and cross-examination (52.3%). Accuracy for true stories was greater than for false stories. Cross-examination improved the detection rates of the false stories, but worsened the accuracy for the true stories. The participants did however rate younger children's true reports to be more credible and believable than their false reports. Participants rated older children's false reports as more credible and believable than their true reports.

Effects of mothers’ conversation style and receipt of misinformation on children's event reports

Can memory sharing conversations with mothers lead to errors in children's event memory when mothers are exposed to misinformation about what their children experienced and does this effect vary as a function of maternal memory-sharing style? Mothers were exposed to a false suggestion about a non-shared event and then discussed that event with their children. When later interviewed, those children whose mothers were provided this misinformation were likely to wrongly report experiencing activities consistent with the maternal suggestion and embellish their reports of these activities with elaborative detail. Moreover, children whose mothers spoke in a highly elaborative manner were more likely to recall occurrences in line with the maternal suggestion and provided more fictitious narrative detail describing non-occurring-but-suggested information than did children whose mothers used a less elaborative style. These findings suggest that when mothers hold false beliefs about a non-shared event, an elaborative maternal style is associated with an increase in children's false reports reflecting maternal beliefs.

If at First You Don't Remember, Try, Try Again: The Role of Initial Encoding in Children's False Reports

To examine the extent to which differences in the initial encoding of information affect preschoolers' vulnerability to suggestion, 4 groups of 4-year-olds (N = 54) individually participated in a simulated shopping event in which they were asked to purchase 6 items from a specially constructed grocery store. Half the children had only 1 opportunity to purchase the list of items, whereas the remaining half returned to the store on multiple occasions until they correctly purchased all 6 items on 2 consecutive trials. Following the shopping event, the children were interviewed in either a neutral or suggestive manner on 3 occasions over a 3-week period. The suggestive interviews contained strongly worded suggestions that certain items had been purchased, when in fact they had not been on the list. One week later, all the children were questioned by a new interviewer. Compared with the children in the other 3 groups, those in the 1-trial suggestive group were more likely to spontaneously report suggested items during the final interview, demonstrating that poor versus strong initial encoding heightens proneness to postevent suggestions.