Training Humans to Detect Children's Lies Through Their Facial Expressions.

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Forensic Psychology
• Child Development

Background:

• Accurate detection of children's truthful and dishonest reports is crucial, as children are significant information providers.
• Previous research indicated that children asked to lie show more surprise when interviewed about an event.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if humans can be trained to detect children's deception by recognizing surprised facial expressions.
• To assess the effectiveness of different training methods on improving lie detection accuracy in adults observing children.

Main Methods:

• Participants judged children's truthfulness based on brief video clips of their facial expressions.
• Two studies were conducted, comparing a training condition with a control condition, and modifying training in the second study.

Main Results:

• Adults trained to detect deception performed above chance levels in identifying children's lies.
• Modified training in Study 2 further improved detection accuracy.
• Participants consistently exhibited a lie bias, potentially over-perceiving deception.

Conclusions:

• Facial expressions, specifically surprise, can be utilized to train adults in detecting children's deception.
• While training enhances accuracy, a persistent lie bias remains a challenge.
• Further research is needed to address the complexities of using facial cues for deception detection in children.