Gadea Marien, Aliño Marta, Espert Raúl, Salvador Alicia
Department of Psychobiology, Faculty of Psychology, University of València, València Spain.
Front Psychol. 2015 Jul 28;6:1089. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01089. eCollection 2015.
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.
本研究呈现了一组儿童说谎时的面部表情与一组成年人检测谎言准确性之间的关系。为了评估儿童面部情绪内容的强度和类型，我们应用了一种能够分析视频记录中面部信息的自动化方法（FaceReader 5.0软件）。该程序将视频分类为显示中性面部表情或情绪性面部表情。与中性视频相比，情绪性视频的命中均值显著更高，并且中性表情的强度与检测者的命中次数之间存在显著的负相关。与面无表情表达的谎言相比，成年人更容易识别通过情绪性面部表情表达的谎言；因此，孩子的表情越少，就越难被猜出。然后，测谎仪的准确性与其人格障碍的亚临床特征相关联，结果发现，在依赖型人格上得分较高的参与者作为测谎仪的表现明显更好。还发现女性有更好辨别能力的趋势并不显著，而男性在判断儿童的真实性时往往比女性更具怀疑性。这项研究首次自动解码了说谎儿童的面部信息，并在欺骗行为研究的背景下将这些结果与测谎仪的人格特征联系起来。研究还提出了对法医心理学的启示：探讨在询问儿童时诱导其产生情绪是否有助于在法律审判中评估证词。
