Critical Summary of a recent journal article in cognitive psychology Essay

Critical Summary of a recent journal article in cognitive psychology. The aim of this is to help students in their critical reading and note taking - Essay Example This article describes the different psychological aspects of how children tend to lie and whether the adults are able to determine if the child is lying or not. It explains a child’s psychology that with age a child starts to determine the concepts and thinking of adults and hence he can successfully lie. In this respect a lengthy research was conducted in which children from the age group of 10 to 13 were chosen and they were interviewed. These interviews were videotaped and shown to observers who were then questioned and data was collected from them to reach to a final result to determine the different verbal and non verbal aspects of a child’s lying and whether the adults could accurately find out if the child was lying or not. The results of the research showed that prepared lies were difficult to be caught than unprepared ones and the reason for this being that the children are able to think and plan the details before lying. It also showed that they could more easily know that the child is telling the truth but it is difficult for them to judge whether he is lying. And last but not the least adults were not good at determining the child’s deception. Regarding the children it was seen that they were equally nervous when they were telling a lie or the truth when facing the interviewer so this could not be considered to be a major factor. One interesting thing which was seen was that the lying patterns of children were somewhat similar to adults as they tried to remain calm and cool while lying and also they were actually trying to relate their lies with real life incidents. The final conclusion that we get is that it is very difficult for an adult to know if a child is lying or not. This poses a serious problem especially when children facing criminal charges are to be questioned. Factors that adults more often consider to check a child’s lie for example the