How Children Report True and Fabricated Stressful and Non-Stressful Events.

As children can be victims or witnesses to crimes and may be required to testify about their experiences in court, the ability to differentiate between children's true and fabricated accounts of victimization is an important issue. This study used automated linguistic analysis software to detect linguistic patterns in order to differentiate between children's true and false stressful bullying reports and reports of non-stressful events. Results revealed that children displayed different linguistic patterns when reporting true and false stressful and non-stressful stories, with non-stressful stories being more accurately discriminated based on linguistic patterns. Results suggest that it is difficult to discriminate accurately and consistently between children's true and false stories of victimization.

The Effects of Repetition on Children's True and False Reports.

As children are often called upon to provide testimony in court proceedings, determining the veracity of their statements is an important issue. In the course of investigation by police and social workers, children are often repeatedly interviewed about their experiences, though the impact of this repetition on children's true and false statements remains largely unexamined. The current study analysed semantic differences in children's truthful and fabricated statements about an event they had or had not participated in. Results revealed that children's truthful and fabricated reports differed in linguistic content, and that their language also varied with repetition. Discriminant analyses revealed that with repetition, children's true and false reports became increasingly difficult to differentiate using linguistic markers, though true reports were consistently classified correctly at higher rates than false reports. The implications of these findings for legal procedures concerning child witnesses are discussed.

Chinese Children's Moral Evaluation of Lies and Truths-Roles of Context and Parental Individualism-Collectivism Tendencies.

The present study examined Chinese children's moral evaluations of truths and lies about one's own pro-social acts. Children ages 7, 9, and 11 were read vignettes in which a protagonist performs a good deed and is asked about it by a teacher, either in front of the class or in private. In response, the protagonist either tells a modest lie, which is highly valued by the Chinese culture, or tells an immodest truth, which violates the Chinese cultural norms about modesty. Children were asked to identify whether the protagonist's statement was the truth or a lie, and to evaluate how 'good' or 'bad' the statement was. Chinese children rated modest lies more positively than immodest truths, with this effect becoming more pronounced with age. Rural Chinese children and those with at least one nonprofessional parent rated immodest truths less positively when they were told in public rather than in private. Furthermore, Chinese children of parents with high collectivism scores valued modest lies more than did children of parents with low collectivism scores. These findings suggest that both macro- and micro-cultural factors contribute significantly to children's moral understanding of truth and lie telling.