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Record W4406452598 · doi:10.1002/acp.70024

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

2025· article· en· W4406452598 on OpenAlexafffund
Alison M. O’Connor, Jennifer Gongola, Kaila C. Bruer, Thomas D. Lyon, Angela D. Evans

Bibliographic record

VenueApplied Cognitive Psychology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicDeception detection and forensic psychology
Canadian institutionsUniversity of ReginaBrock University
FundersEunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human DevelopmentNational Institute of Child Health and Human DevelopmentSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsLie detectionPsychologyDeceptionFacial expressionCoding (social sciences)Cognitive psychologyDevelopmental psychologySocial psychologyCommunication

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The accurate detection of children's truthful and dishonest reports is essential as children can serve as important providers of information. Research using automated facial coding and machine learning found that children who were asked to lie about an event were more likely to look surprised when hearing the first question during an interview about said event. The present studies explored if humans can be trained to look for surprised expressions to detect children's deception. Participants made lie-detection judgments after seeing children's expressions in very brief clips. In Study 1, we compared performance across a training condition and control condition, and in Study 2 we modified the training. With training, adults could detect children's lies at above chance levels by viewing their facial expression. Detection accuracy was further improved with modified training (Study 2), but participants held a consistent lie bias. Challenges with using facial expressions to detect deceit are discussed.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Other design · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.891
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.003

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.058
GPT teacher head0.386
Teacher spread0.328 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designOther design
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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