Causal Indicators for Assessing the Truthfulness of Child Speech in Forensic Interviews.

When interviewing a child who may have witnessed a crime, the interviewer must ask carefully directed questions in order to elicit a truthful statement from the child. The presented work uses Granger causal analysis to examine and represent child-interviewer interaction dynamics over such an interview. Our work demonstrates that Granger Causal analysis of psycholinguistic and acoustic signals from speech yields significant predictors of whether a child is telling the truth, as well as whether a child will disclose witnessing a transgression later in the interview. By incorporating cross-modal Granger causal features extracted from audio and transcripts of forensic interviews, we are able to substantially outperform conventional deception detection methods and a number of simulated baselines. Our results suggest that a child's use of concreteness and imageability in their language are strong psycholinguistic indicators of truth-telling and that the coordination of child and interviewer speech signals is much more informative than the specific language used throughout the interview.

Detecting children's true and false denials of wrongdoing: Effects of question type and base rate knowledge.

One common and unfortunately overlooked obstacle to the detection of sexual abuse is non-disclosure by children. Non-disclosure in forensic interviews may be expressed via concealment in response to recall questions or via active denials in response to recognition (e.g., yes/no) questions. In two studies, we evaluated whether adults' ability to discern true and false denials of wrongdoing by children varied as a function of the types of interview question the children were asked. Results suggest that adults are not good at detecting deceptive denials of wrongdoing by children, even when the adults view children narrate their experiences in response to recall questions rather than provide one word answers to recognition questions. In Study 1, adults exhibited a consistent "truth bias," leading them toward believing children, regardless of whether the children's denials were true or false. In Study 2, adults were given base-rate information about the occurrence of true and false denials (50% of each). The information eliminated the adults' truth bias but did not improve their overall detection accuracy, which still hovered near chance. Adults did, however, perceive children's denials as slightly more credible when they emerged in response to recall rather than recognition questions, especially when children were honestly denying wrongdoing. Results suggest the need for caution when evaluating adults' judgments of children's veracity when the children fail to disclose abuse.

Effects of the putative confession instruction on perceptions of children's true and false statements.

The putative confession (PC) instruction (i.e., "[suspect] told me everything that happened and wants you to tell the truth") during forensic interviews with children has been shown to increase the accuracy of children's statements, but it is unclear whether adults' perceptions are sensitive to this salutary effect. The present study examined how adults perceive children's true and false responses to the PC instruction. Participants (n = 299) watched videotaped interviews of children and rated the child's credibility and the truthfulness of his/her statements. When viewing children's responses to the PC instruction, true and false statements were rated as equally credible, and there was a decrease in accuracy for identifying false denials as lies. These findings suggest that participants viewed the PC instruction as truth-inducing. Implications for the forensic use of the PC instruction are discussed.

Mental state at time of offense in the hot tub: An empirical examination of concurrent expert testimony in an insanity case.

The role of experts and their presentation of testimony in insanity cases remain controversial. In order to decrease possible expert bias associated with this testimony, a number of different alternatives to adversarial presentation have been suggested. Two such alternatives are the use of court-appointed experts and the use of concurrent testimony (or "hot-tubbing"), in which opposing experts provide testimony concurrently and converse with each other directly. An experiment using a sample of venire jurors (n = 150) tested the effect of these alternatives. Results indicate that participants' pre-existing attitudes towards the insanity defense had significant effects on their comprehension of expert testimony, their evaluations of the two opposing experts, and their eventual verdicts, over and above the presentation format (i.e., concurrent vs. traditional testimony) or the use of court-appointed experts (vs. traditional adversarial experts). When concurrent testimony was presented, defense-favoring experts were perceived by jurors as more credible than their traditional counterparts, though comprehension of the testimony did not increase; nor did the presentation format or the affiliation of the experts affect verdicts. The legal and policy implications of the incorporation of the hot-tubbing procedure to US courts are discussed.

Detecting deception in children: A meta-analysis.

Although research reveals that children as young as 3 can use deception and will take steps to obscure truth, research concerning how well others detect children's deceptive efforts remains unclear. Yet adults regularly assess whether children are telling the truth in a variety of contexts, including at school, in the home, and in legal settings, particularly in investigations of maltreatment. We conducted a meta-analysis to synthesize extant research concerning adults' ability to detect deceptive statements produced by children. We included 45 experiments involving 7,893 adult judges and 1,858 children. Overall, adults could accurately discriminate truths/lies at an average rate of 54%, which is slightly but significantly above chance levels. The average rate at which true statements were correctly classified as honest was higher (63.8%), whereas the rate at which lies were classified as dishonest was not different from chance (47.5%). A small positive correlation emerged between judgment confidence and judgment accuracy. Professionals (e.g., social workers, police officers, teachers) slightly outperformed laypersons (e.g., college undergraduates). Finally, exploratory analyses revealed that the child's age did not significantly affect the rate at which adults could discriminate truths/lies from chance. Future research aimed toward improving lie detection accuracy might focus more on individual differences in children's lie-telling abilities in order to uncover any reliable indicators of deception. (PsycINFO Database Record

The biasing effect of the "sexually violent predator" label on legal decisions.

Public fear has driven legislation designed to identify and exclude sexual offenders from society, culminating in sexually violent predator (SVP) statutes, in which a sex offender who has served his prison sentence is hospitalized indefinitely if a jury determines that he is likely to reoffend as a result of a mental disorder. Jurors rarely vote not to commit a previously-convicted sex offender as an SVP. This study tests whether the mere label of "sexually violent predator" affects these legal decisions. Venire jurors (n=161) were asked to decide whether an individual who had been incarcerated for 16years should be released on parole. The individual was either labeled as a.) a sexually violent predator or b.) a convicted felon, and all other information was identical between the conditions. Jurors were over twice as likely to deny parole to the SVP compared to the felon, even though they did not consider him any more dangerous or any more likely to reoffend. Demographic variables did not moderate this finding. However, jurors' desire to 'get revenge' and to 'make the offender pay', as measured by Gerber and Jackson's (2013) Just Deserts Scale, did significantly relate to decisions to deny parole. These findings suggest that jurors' decisions in SVP hearings are driven by legally impermissible considerations, and that the mere label of "sexually violent predator" induces bias into the decision making process.