Child Maltreatment and Honesty

虐待儿童和诚实

• 批准号: 7035410
• 负责人: THOMAS D LYON
• 金额: $ 37.12万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2006-05-01 至 2011-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7035410
• 关键词: awareness; behavior test; behavioral /social science research tag; child abuse; child foster care /adoption; child psychology; child welfare; clinical research; decision making; developmental psychology; face expression; human subject; interview; legal /correctional; middle childhood (6-11); morals; paralinguistic behavior; preschool child (1-5); psychometrics; social psychology; socializations; verbal behavior; videotape /videodisc

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A team of researchers with expertise in developmental psychology, child and family law, and forensic psychology propose a series of studies to examine honesty in young maltreated and non-maltreated children. The proposal consists four interconnected projects. The first project will examine the development of children's understanding of concepts underlying honesty, including early conceptions of the distinction between the truth and lies, the evaluation of secret-keeping regarding transgressions, and the evaluation of the obligations underlying promises. The second project will examine the determinants of honesty, varying the actions of instigators who may encourage dishonesty and recipient-interviewers who encourage honesty, and assessing characteristics of the child that may have an influence, including maltreatment status, age, and attitudes about honesty. The third project will examine the verbal and nonverbal indices of honesty in children who were coached to lie by instigators or encouraged to be truthful by recipients. The fourth project will examine whether either lay or professional adults are able to distinguish honest from dishonest children. The research will test hypotheses that maltreated children's understanding is subject to underestimation due to insensitive tasks, that maltreated children's honesty can be increased through various means of truth induction, and that maltreated children's honesty can be discriminated through multidimensional analysis of verbal and nonverbal measures. The research is unique in its potential application to the investigation and adjudication of child maltreatment claims, insofar as it is the first sustained research program to utilize tools for assessing and influencing honesty that are potentially useful to child maltreatment professionals and to examine the utility of those tools in children who are in fact the subject of intervention. The findings have potential to improve child maltreatment practice and thus to ensure that children who do in fact need protection from maltreatment are detected and their reports believed.

描述(由申请者提供)：一组在发展心理学、儿童和家庭法以及法医心理学方面有专长的研究人员提出了一系列研究，以检验幼年受虐待和未受虐待儿童的诚实程度。该提案包括四个相互关联的项目。第一个项目将审查儿童对诚实的基本概念的理解发展，包括早期关于区分真相和谎言的概念、对关于违规行为的保密的评估以及对承诺背后的义务的评估。第二个项目将研究诚实的决定因素，改变可能鼓励不诚实的煽动者和鼓励诚实的接受者的行为，并评估可能产生影响的儿童特征，包括虐待状况、年龄和对诚实的态度。第三个项目将考察那些被煽动者教导撒谎或被接受者鼓励诚实的儿童的语言和非语言诚实指数。第四个项目将考察外行或职业成年人是否能够区分诚实和不诚实的儿童。这项研究将检验以下假设：由于不敏感的任务，被虐待儿童的理解被低估，被虐待儿童的诚实可以通过各种真相诱导手段来提高，以及被虐待儿童的诚实可以通过语言和非语言测量的多维分析来区分。这项研究在调查和裁决虐待儿童索赔方面的潜在应用是独一无二的，因为它是第一个利用工具来评估和影响诚实的持续研究计划，这些工具对虐待儿童专业人员可能有用，并检查这些工具在实际上是干预对象的儿童中的效用。这些调查结果有可能改进虐待儿童的做法，从而确保确实需要保护免受虐待的儿童被发现并相信他们的报告。