Dissertation research.

The topic that I’ve explored is lie detection. Specifically, previous research has found that people who are insecure-anxious in their attachment styles are better able to detect lies than others. What is unknown, however, is whether that finding reflects differences in anxious people's ability to discriminate lies from non-lies or whether they have more liberal thresholds for classifying a statement as a lie. These alternative accounts have vastly different implications for understanding insecure attachment. This research attempted to replicate previous work and then extend that work using tools from signal detection theory to test alternative explanations for the phenomenon.

Self-reports of attachment were collected from 254 adults who were asked to watch a series of videos in which they had to determine whether the people in them were lying or telling the truth. The findings suggest that highly anxious participants did not demonstrate superior discrimination compared to their less anxious counterparts. Rather, attachment anxiety was positively associated with a tendency to detect lies regardless of trial type, revealing that highly anxious participants were more biased to detect deceit. This work is now published in Attachment and Human Development.