The detection of deception within investigative contexts: Key challenges and core issues

A large and continually-growing body of research has explored the ways in which deception might be detected. The area is developing rapidly, opening up new avenues of study. This special issue of the Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling brings together an exciting array of papers on the detection of deception within investigative contexts, examining a wide range of issues including; the efficacy of different interviewing techniques, the reliability of statement veracity assessment, factors influencing ability to detect deception and the need for applied research and ecologically valid studies. This examination of the key challenges and core issues surrounding the detection of deception within the criminal justice domain helps move the field forward, providing powerful results that have potentially far-reaching impacts. These are considered in detail throughout the following discussion

Real-world, high-stakes deceptive speech: Theoretical validation and an examination of its potential for detection automation

The study of deception and the theories which have been developed have relied heavily on laboratory experiments, in controlled environments, utilizing American college students, participating in mock scenarios. The goal of this study was to validate previous deception research in a real-world high-stakes environment. An additional focus of this study was the development of procedures to process data (e.g. video or audio recordings) from real-world environments in such a manner that behavioral measures can be extracted and analyzed. This study utilized previously confirmed speech cues and constructs to deception in an attempt to validate a leading deception theory, Interpersonal Deception Theory (IDT). Several measures and constructs, utilized and validated in existing research, were explored and validated in this study. The data analyzed came from an adjudicated real-world high-stakes criminal case in which the subject was sentenced in federal court to 470 years in prison for creating child pornography, rape, sexual exploitation of children, child sexual assault and kidnapping; a crime spree that spanned over a five years and four states. The results did validate IDT with mixed results on individual measures and their constructs. The exploratory nature of the study, the volume of data, and the numerous methods of analysis used generated many possibilities for future research