Children’s emotional reactions to being lied to

Abstract

Whether they realize it or not, children are frequently lied to (Heyman et al., 2009). Previous research has used hypothetical scenarios and vignettes to explore children’s beliefs surrounding lying (Bussey, 1999; Cheung et al., 2015; Smith & Rizzo, 2017) and emotions as lie-tellers (Smith & Rizzo, 2017), rather than children’s everyday experiences with being deceived. The current study explored children’s lived experiences with being deceived, particularly their emotional experiences. Child participants (n = 509, ages 6-11, 56% boys) were asked to recall a time when they were lied to and how being lied to made them feel. Specifically, the emotion(s) they felt and how intensely they felt those emotions. As anticipated, children were significantly more likely to report feeling negative emotions (e.g., sadness, anger, disappointment) after being lied to than neutral (e.g., fine, normal, okay; p < .001) or positive emotions (e.g., happiness, amusement; p < .001). Children who reported experiencing negative emotions tended to be younger than children who reported neutral emotions (p = .005). Younger children also reported more intense emotions (r = -0.13, p = .005). Girls were more likely than boys to feel negative emotions (p = .016) and reported feeling their emotions more intensely than boys (p = .001), whereas boys reported more neutral emotions than girls (p = .003). This has implications for parenting practices, as parents are frequent sources of deception in childhood (Heyman et al., 2009).