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The purpose of this paper is to test how modifying one’s alibi statement interacts with exposure to deceptive interrogation techniques.

In all, 90 participants walked about a university building for 15 minutes and either stole an envelope from a staff pigeonhole (guilty condition) or put the envelope there along the way (innocent condition). Subsequently, participants were asked to provide an alibi for the past 15 minutes. Guilty and half of the innocent participants were instructed to omit that they had been in the vicinity of the pigeonholes. The rest of the innocent participants were asked to tell the truth. Several days later, participants were questioned about six statements taken from their alibis, three of which contained altered information.

As expected, participants were largely blind to our alterations, with detection rates ranging from 1 to 36 percent. Contrary to cognitive load predictions, detection rates did not vary as a function of truthfulness. Rather, guilty participants were less likely to detect alterations than innocents.

Memory distrust and guilty suspects’ aim to keep a low profile might be possible explanations for these findings.

It is recommended that law enforcement officers and other legal practitioners refrain from using deceptive interrogation techniques and such techniques that can cause inconsistencies in suspects’ reports. Researcher should make it their task to educate these professional groups about the natural occurrence of memory related, non-deceptive inconsistencies in successive statements.

This research uses a new methodology to study the effect of deceptive interrogation techniques on both innocent and guilty suspects. The findings are relevant for legal practitioners and researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss unresolved problems that are reflected in the social scientific research on the linguistic detection of deception in statements, with particular attention to problems of methodology, practical utility for law enforcement statement analysts, and epistemology.

The author reviewed the design, data, statistical calculations, and findings of English language peer‐reviewed studies of the linguistic detection of deception in statements. In some cases, the author re‐analyzed the study data.

Social scientific research holds promise for the development of new methods of linguistic detection of deception that are more thoroughly validated than the linguistic methods law enforcement investigators have been using for many years. Nonetheless, published studies reflect one or more of the following sources of weakness in developing and evaluating detection models: the use of analytes (statements) of uncertain validity; the problematic universality and practical utility of linguistic variables; the widespread use of deficient proportion‐of‐stimuli‐correct “hit rate” calculations to assess the accuracy of detection methods; a possibly irresolvable epistemological limit to the ability of any linguistic detection method to prove deception without confirmation by means external to the analysis.

The research was limited to English language studies in the linguistic detection of deception literature and to the re‐calculation of data in the research literature. Whether the paper has implications for future studies depends on the success of two arguments that are made: the published research projects in the field reflect one or more of four methodological problems that create doubt about the validity and/or the practical utility of their results; and the linguistic detection of deception is subject to an epistemological problem which theoretically limits the ability of any linguistic method of detection to establish with certainty the status of any particular questioned statement.

This is the first published paper to identify and discuss a possibly irresolvable epistemological issue in the detection of deception by linguistic means, as well as unresolved issues of methodology and of utility to law enforcement analysts that characterize the research and the detection models in this field. It is also the first published paper to deconstruct the simple hit rate (and its variants) in order to demonstrate its deficiencies.

For police officers, the ability to distinguish between truthful and deceptive statements in interrogations is essential. However, research shows that their classification accuracy is typically rather low. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ability to detect deception as a function of perceived experience, in a sample of German police officers and police trainees.

The authors had the participants judge ten video recordings of a mock crime with respect to the displayed suspects’ truthfulness. Following the assumptions and findings of previous research, the authors expected their manipulation of perceived experience to increase detection accuracy, but expected objective experience not to be correlated with the ability to detect deception.

As expected, police officers and trainees in the experience condition achieved higher accuracy than control participants. On the objective self‐report measures of experience, no relationship with classification accuracy was found.

The findings suggest that police officers’ objective experience does not perfectly translate into subjective experience. A subjective feeling of experience can be sufficient enough to increase detection accuracy, even if one is objectively inexperienced.

The manipulation proved to be a simple and efficient method of increasing judgmental accuracy in lie detection without increasing police officers’ actual knowledge or changing their beliefs about deception cues.

Understanding when an individual is being deceptive is an important part of police and criminal investigations. While investigators have developed multiple methods, the research literature has yet to fully explore some of the newer applied techniques. This study aims to investigate statement analysis, a recent approach in forensic linguistic analysis that has been applied to criminal investigations.

Real-world statements of individuals exposed as deceptive or truthful were used in the analyses. A behaviour sequence analysis approach is used to provide a timeline analysis of the individuals’ statements.

Results indicate that sequential patterns are different in deceptive statements compared to truthful statements. For example, deceptive statements were more likely to include vague words and temporal lacunas, to convince investigators into believing that the suspect was not present when the crime occurred. The sample in this research did not use one deceptive indicator, instead, electing to frequently change the order of deceptive indicators. Gaps in deception were also noted, and there was common repetition found in both the deceptive and truthful statements. While gaps are predicted to occur in truthful statements to reflect an absence of deception, gaps occurring in the deceptive statements are likely due to cognitive load.

The current research provides more support for using statement analysis in real-world criminal cases.

This study seeks to evaluate the accuracy of non‐verbal behaviors in differentiating between criminals and innocent citizens in real‐life police‐citizen encounters, and evaluate the impact of race as a confounding influence on the display of these non‐verbal behaviors.

This study involved the frame‐by‐frame analysis of 240 videotaped interactions between citizens and police officers to determine the frequency with which citizens of different races and differing roles (offender versus non‐offender) display specific non‐verbal behaviors officers are trained to believe are indicators of suspicion.

The findings suggest that the non‐verbal cues of frequent speech disruptions, frequent or inappropriate smiles, the avoidance of eye contact, and increased hand gestures are poor indicators of criminal involvement and are strongly influenced by the race/ethnicity of the individual.

The videotaped police‐citizen interactions on which this study was based were from a “reality television” show, thus preventing a random sample.

This study would be useful to police officers who rely on the use of non‐verbal cues, training personnel who instruct in the areas of non‐verbal communication, and researchers who examine the potential causes of racial bias in the actions of police officers.

While earlier studies have investigated this issue with laboratory experiments under artificial conditions, this study provides a test of the influence of race on non‐verbal behavior during real life official police‐citizen interactions in the field.

The purpose of this paper is to address the complexity of missing persons cases and highlight the linguistic differences that arise in this type of crime. Missing persons cases are typically very complex investigations. Without a body, crime scene forensics is not possible, and police are often left only with witness and suspect statements. Forensic linguistics methods may help investigators to prioritise or remove suspects. There are many competing approaches in forensic linguistic analysis; however, there is limited empirical research available on emerging methods.

This research investigates Statement Analysis, a recent development in linguistic analysis that has practical applications in criminal investigations. Real-world statements of individuals convicted of or found to be not guilty of their involvement in missing persons cases were used in the analyses. In addition, Behaviour Sequence Analysis was used to map the progressions of language in the suspects' statements.

Results indicated differences between the guilty and innocent individuals based on their language choices, for example, guilty suspects in missing [alive] cases were found more likely to use passive language and vague words because of high levels of cognitive load associated with the several types of guilty knowledge suspects in missing persons cases possess. Of particular interest is the use of untruthful words in the innocent suspects’ statements in missing [murdered] cases. While typically seen in deceptive statements, untruthful words in innocent statements may result because of false acquittals.

This research provides some support for Statement Analysis as a suitable approach to analysing linguistic statements in missing persons cases.