Automated decoding of facial expressions reveals marked differences in children when telling antisocial versus prosocial lies

Understanding Lies Based on Evolutionary Psychology: A Critical Review

“…This is consistent with the observations made by the proponents of the theory of evolution more than a century ago regarding the precocity of lies in human development (Darwin, 1877). Zanette, Gao, Brunet, Bartlett, and Lee (2016), using the facial expressions coding system developed by Paul Ekman, also demonstrated a diff erent facial expression in children from six to eleven years of age, in relation to uttering pro-and antisocial lies.…”

Identifying Liars Through Automatic Decoding of Children's Facial Expressions

“…Deception, including verbal lie-telling, involves intentionally instilling a false-belief in another person by either failing to volunteer information, feigning ignorance, or creating a false statement (Talwar, Lee, Bala, & Lindsay, 2002). To successfully deceive another, one must make the appropriate verbal statements as well as convey nonverbal information (i.e., facial expressions, body language) that matches the social context of the lie being told (e.g., smiling while pretending to like a disappointing gift; Zanette, Gao, Brunet, Bartlett, & Lee, 2016). By 6 years of age, most children have developed the skills necessary to convincingly deceive another by adapting their verbal and nonverbal behaviors (e.g., Evans & Lee, 2013;Lewis et al, 1989;.…”

“…Although this hand-coding FACS classification system has been demonstrated to be reliable and is widely used (Ekman & Rosenberg, 1997), it is very expensive and inefficient (Ekman & Friesen, 1978); Hand-coding requires many hours of intensive training, can take up to 3 hr to manually code 1 min of behavior, and is susceptible to humanrelated errors stemming from attention-lapses and fatigue (Ekman & Friesen, 1978;Littlewort, Whitehill, et al, 2011;Zanette et al, 2016). Thankfully, with the advancement of computer vision technology and machine learning, the FACS coding method has now been automated (e.g., Bartlett et al, 2006;iMotions, 2018;Lewinski, den Uyl, & Butler, 2014).…”

“…There are many advantages to using this automated FACS technology. First, it is capable of retroactively investigating facial expressions using only a simple video recording-allowing for a noninvasive method to examine facial expressions in a variety of settings (e.g., Bartlett, Littlewort, Frank, & Lee, 2014;Zanette et al, 2016). Second, it is faster and more cost-effective than the traditional handcoding method.…”

“…We were also interested in examining which specific emotion expressions differentiate liars from nonliars. Previous research has found that smiling and joyful expressions (Zanette et al, 2016) are related to children's lie-telling; However, these studies focused on children's lies about breaking a rule (i.e., temptation resistance paradigm). The present study is the first to examine children's facial expressions while lying at the request of an adult confederate, as well as the first to examine facial expressions during lies of omission.…”