Hindsight bias for emotional faces.

People who learn the outcome to a situation or problem tend to overestimate what was known in the past-this is hindsight bias. Whereas previous research has revealed robust hindsight bias in the visual domain, little is known about how outcome information affects our memory of others' emotional expressions. The goal of the current work was to test whether participants exhibited hindsight bias for emotional faces and whether this varied as a function of emotion. Across five experiments, participants saw images of faces displaying different emotions. In the foresight phase, participants watched several emotional faces gradually clarify from blurry to clear. Once participants believed they knew what emotion the face was exhibiting, they identified the emotion from several options (e.g., angry, disgusted, happy, scared, surprised). In the hindsight phase, participants saw clear versions of each face before stopping the clarification at the point at which they previously identified the emotional expression. On average, participants exhibited hindsight bias for all emotions except happy faces (i.e., they indicated that they identified the emotional expressions at a blurrier point in hindsight than they had in foresight). A multinomial processing tree model of our data revealed that this was not due to participants' better recollection of foresight judgments for happy faces compared to the other emotions. Additionally, participants showed a smaller reconstruction bias for happy faces than the other emotions. We discuss the social implications of these findings as well as the potential for this paradigm to be used across cultures and ages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Stable truthiness effect across the lifespan.

When semantically-related photos appear with true-or-false trivia claims, people more often rate the claims as true compared to when photos are absent-truthiness. This occurs even when the photos lack information useful for assessing veracity. We tested whether truthiness changed in magnitude as a function of participants' age in a diverse sample using materials appropriate for all ages. We tested participants (N = 414; Age range = 3-87 years) in two culturally diverse environments: a community science center (First language: English (61.4%); Mandarin/Cantonese (11.6%); Spanish (6%), other (21%); ethnicity: unreported) and a psychology lab (First language: English (64.4%); Punjabi (9.8%); Mandarin/Cantonese (7.4%); other (18.4%); ethnicity: Caucasian (38%); South Asian (30.7%); Asian (22.7%); other/unreported (8.6%). Participants rated trivia claims as true or false. Half the claims appeared with a semantically related photo, and half appeared without a photo. Results showed that participants of all ages more often rated claims as true when claims appeared with a photo; however, this truthiness effect was stable across the lifespan. If truthiness age differences exist, they are likely negligible in the general population. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Differences in child sexual abuse cases involving child versus adolescent complainants.

While adolescents report the highest rates of sexual abuse victimization, few studies have investigated how child sexual abuse (CSA) cases involving adolescent complainants may differ from cases involving child complainants. The current study draws on 3,430 allegations of CSA in Canada to compare abuse characteristics and judicial outcomes in cases involving adolescent complainants to cases involving child complainants. Adolescent complainants were more likely than child complainants to be abused by a stranger or a person with a community connection to the complainant, while children were more likely than adolescents to be abused by a parent or other relative. Furthermore, compared to child complainants, adolescent complainants were more frequently involved in the most intrusive offenses and their cases were more likely to involve violence. Both groups were most likely to disclose the abuse to a parent, though a greater proportion of children disclosed the abuse to a parent. There were no differences in the delay to disclosure. Accused were equally likely to plead "guilty" and to be convicted in cases involving child and adolescent complainants. However, offenders convicted of the most intrusive offenses received longer probation sentences when the complainant was a child than when the complainant was an adolescent. These findings have implications for ensuring appropriate support and services to adolescent victims of CSA.