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Are physically attractive people more skilled than unattractive people at distinguishing truth from deception? To address this question, we showed videotapes of truthful and deceptive messages to 102 males and females classified as low, medium, or high in attractiveness. The speakers shown on the tapes were telling truths and lies to attractive or unattractive listeners of the same or opposite sex. The lies that the speakers told to attractive listeners were generally easier to detect than were the lies that they told to unattractive listeners. The lies told to attractive listeners were even more accurately identified by subjects who were themselves of average or high attractiveness (as defined by the ratings made by their peers) than by those who were unattractive. Conversely, the lies told to unattractive listeners were relatively more accurately detected by subjects who were unattractive than by those who were moderately attractive or very attractive. These findings are consistent with a skill-specificity formulation. The role of practice and experience in the development of skill at detecting deception is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Subjects, 22 males and 22 females, observed a videotape of 6 males and 6females who were sometimes lying and sometimes telling the truth. Subjects were instructed to pay special attention to the tone of voice, the words, or the visual cues of the senders, or were given no special attentional instructions (control condition). Subjects told to pay particular attention to the tone of voice were significantly more successful at distinguishing truth from deception than subjects in the control condition. Further analyses showed that the instructions to subjects to attend to tone significantly increased the degree to which they rated the truthful messages as truthful, but it did not increase the degree to which the;' rated the deceptive messages as deceptive. It was suggested that tone of voice cues may be particularly informative to perceivers making judgments of truthfulness, and that perceivers do not always take full advantage of the cues that are available to them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Androgynous, sex-typed, and undifferentiated subjects predicted the responses of androgynous, sex-typed, and undifferentiated others to masculine, feminine, and neutral situations. The self-report criterion data replicated the findings of Helmreich, Spence, & Holahan (1979). In accordance with Cronbach's (1955) suggestion, separate correlational measures of person accuracy, situation accuracy, and person-by-situation accuracy were computed. Subjects were more accurate at predicting person effects and situation effects than person-by-situation interactions. Females-particularly feminine-typed females-were best at making person predictions, while males-particularly masculine-typed and androgynous males were best at making situation predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study explored the relationship between help-seeking and sensitivity to covert and overt nonverbal cues of emotion. In a help-seeking context, covert cues (cues one is trying to hide) would often include signs of annoyance and inconvenience expressed by a potential helper, while overt cues (cues one is trying to convey) would include polite signs of compliance and willingness to give aid. It was hypothesized and found that individuals who seek help readily, compared to those who are more reluctant to ask for help, are relatively more sensitive to overt emotional cues than to covert emotional cues. The implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over 300 subjects at four different age levels predicted situational variations in two different self-reported responses of persons asking for help. Accuracy at this task was substantially better than chance. Subjects were more accurate in predicting the importance to askers of getting help than their feelings about asking for help. Predictions of importance were relatively more accurate in same-sex giver-asker dyads, while predictions of feelings were relatively more accurate in opposite-sex dyads. Females were more accurate predictors than males, and they were more accurately judged than males. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The structure of skill at decoding nonverbal cues was examined for 150 high school students and 95 college students. An overall principal components analysis yielded four factors differing in the complexity of the message (pure versus mixed) and in the relative importance of the video versus the audio modality. Factor 1 (pure video) was defined by accuracy at face and body cues of ordinary (2 second) and very brief exposure length. Factor 2 (mixed video) was defined by accuracy at face and body cues with a "noisy" background. Factor 3 (mixed audio) was defined by accuracy at decoding discrepant cues and "noisy" audio cues. Factor 4 (ure audio) was defined by accuracy at pure tone of voice cues. The overall evidence suggested that despite a nontrivial degree of relationship among all measures of skill at decoding nonverbal cues (Armor's Theta = .62), it would increase our theoretical and empirical precision to conceptualize nonverbal decoding ability as made up of several relatively unrelated subskills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two studies examined adults' willingness to accept help from children. In Study 1 adults were less willing to accept free art lessons from competent children than from competent adults. Help-acceptance from children was not increased by suggesting to subjects that by accepting the lessons they would help the children to become better teachers of art. Study 2 replicated the latter finding, and also examined certain personality correlates of help-accepting, including self-esteem, need for approval, and sex-typing. Women were more likely to accept help than men, and subjects scoring high on the femininity scale of Spence's Personal Attributes Questionnaire accepted help more than subjects scoring low on that scale. Self-esteem and need for approval were useful moderator variables. Often, different relationships between help-accepting and other variables were obtained for subjects scoring high on self-esteem or need for approval than for subjects scoring lo won those variables. Social implications of adults' reluctance to accept help from children are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of on-the-job experience in fostering skill at detecting deception was examined. A deception-detection test was administered to three samples of more than 100 subjects each: a group of undergraduates with no special experiences at detecting deceit; a group of new recruits to a federal law enforcement training program, who had some limited on-the-job experience at detecting deceit; and a group of advanced federal law enforcement officers, with years of experience working at jobs in which the detection of deception is very important. Although the officer samples were more confident about their judgments of deceptiveness than were the students, they were no more accurate than the students. None of the three groups showed a significant improvement in deception-detection success from the first half to the second half of the test; however, the advanced officers left increasingly confident about their performance as they progressed through the test Correlational analyses of the relationship between accuracy and confidence provided further evidence that experience does not improve people's awareness of the accuracy or inaccuracy of their judgments. The findings from this research are compared to the results of research on other kinds of professional decision-makers (e.g., clinical psychologists), and several Theoretical perspectives on the role of experience in decision making are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors report a meta-analysis of individual differences in detecting deception, confining attention to occasions when people judge strangers' veracity in real-time with no special aids. The authors have developed a statistical technique to correct nominal individual differences for differences introduced by random measurement error. Although researchers have suggested that people differ in the ability to detect lies, psychometric analyses of 247 samples reveal that these ability differences are minute. In terms of the percentage of lies detected, measurement-corrected standard deviations in judge ability are less than 1%. In accuracy, judges range no more widely than would be expected by chance, and the best judges are no more accurate than a stochastic mechanism would produce. When judging deception, people differ less in ability than in the inclination to regard others' statements as truthful. People also differ from one another as lie- and truth-tellers. They vary in the detectability of their lies. Moreover, some people are more credible than others whether lying or truth-telling. Results reveal that the outcome of a deception judgment depends more on the liar's credibility than any other individual difference., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA)