Police officers are often trained to use the Behavior Analysis Interview (BAI) to detect deceit, but it is based on faulty indicators of lying that may be especially problematic for juveniles due to developmental immaturities. Juveniles, young adults, and adults were assigned to guilt or innocence conditions, read a criminal scenario, and…

One current conceptualization of attention subdivides it into functions of alerting, orienting, and executive control. Alerting describes the function of tonically maintaining the alert state and phasically responding to a warning signal. Automatic and voluntary orienting are involved in the selection of information among multiple sensory inputs.…

Eye gaze plays a pivotal role during communication. When interacting deceptively, it is commonly believed that the deceiver will break eye contact and look downward. We examined whether children's gaze behavior when lying is consistent with this belief. In our study, 7- to 15-year-olds and adults answered questions truthfully ("Truth" questions)…

Two experiments were designed to replicate and extend previous findings on the transformation of avoidance response functions in accordance with the relational frames of Same and Opposite. Participants were first exposed to non-arbitrary and arbitrary relational training and testing. Next, during avoidance conditioning, one stimulus from the…

Observers can decide what kind of relationship exists between two people by identifying cues provided by the pattern of benefits given and received in relationships and the type of relationship, either communal or exchange. Communal relationships, i.e., friendships or romances, are characterized by feelings of responsibility for each other's…

Discriminating what is pretense from what is real is a fundamental problem in development. Research has addressed the proficiency with which adults and children discriminate between play fighting and real fighting, and yet none (to our knowledge) has investigated discrimination of other kinds of pretense and real acts. In addition, little is known…

Mentally retarded adults (N=180) were asked 30 yes/no questions, to determine if their acquiescence is explained by indiscriminant yea-saying in response to the yes/no question format or due to subjects submitting to the influence of the interviewer. After selected questions, the interviewer either nodded his head "yes" or shook his head…

Tested assumptions about behavioral cues that clients use to infer what helpers intend. Questions and acknowledgments were best predictors of client perceptions. Guiding was perceived more often than advisement actually occurred. Intention of communicating understanding of message shifted from reflection in the analogue to acknowledgment in the…

The search for syntactical rules which govern nonverbal communication and cues in humans has often been considered a problem separate from determining semantic rules. Departing from such a traditional approach was accomplished by employing the meaning of various nonverbal channels to study their interrelationship. It was proposed that the…

A formal model is presented that decomposes the attribution of personal dispositions into identification and dispositional inference processes. Two illustrative experiments trace the processing of behavioral and situational information at the identification and dispositional inference stages and examine attributions as a joint product of the…

The study sought to determine if there are differences between shifts of workers in Intermediate Care Facilities in their ratings of the daily living skills of mentally retarded residents, and whether these differences reflect actual differences in performance by the residents. Staff were interviewed concerning the level of prompt required to…