Child Maltreatment and Honesty

一组在发展心理学、儿童和家庭法以及法医方面有专长的研究人员 心理学提出了一系列研究，以检验受虐待和未受虐待的年轻人的诚实程度 孩子们。该提案包括四个相互关联的项目。第一个项目将检查发展情况 儿童对诚实背后的概念的理解，包括早期的区分概念 在真实与谎言之间，对违法行为的保密评价，以及对 承诺背后的义务。第二个项目将考察诚实的决定因素，不同的 可能鼓励不诚实的煽动者和鼓励诚实的面试官的行为， 以及评估可能对儿童产生影响的特征，包括虐待状况、年龄、 以及对诚实的态度。第三个项目将考察诚实的语言和非语言指标 被煽动者教导撒谎或被接受者鼓励诚实的儿童。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。 这项研究将检验这样的假设，即被虐待的儿童的理解力容易被低估 对于不敏感的任务，可以通过各种真相的手段来增加受虐待儿童的诚实 可以通过多维分析来区分受虐待儿童的诚实程度 语言和非语言的措施。这项研究的独特之处在于其潜在的应用于调查和 对虐待儿童索赔的裁决，因为这是第一个利用工具的持续研究方案 评估和影响诚实，这可能对虐待儿童专业人员有用，并 审查这些工具在儿童中的效用，他们实际上是干预的对象。研究结果表明 有可能改进虐待儿童的做法，从而确保确实需要的儿童 检测到防止虐待的保护措施，并相信他们的报告。

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 uitilize 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.