APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 19: 985–1001 (2005) Published online 16 June 2005 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.1139 Discriminating Adults’ Genuine, Imagined, and Deceptive Accounts of Positive and Negative Childhood Events AMANDA J. BARNIER 1 *, STEFANIE J. SHARMAN 1 , LISA MCKAY 1 and SIEGFRIED L. SPORER 2 1 University of New South Wales, Australia 2 University of Giessen, Germany SUMMARY We examined the qualitative characteristics of genuine, imagined, and deceptive accounts of positive and negative childhood events. We investigated whether trained raters could discriminate between these accounts using the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire (MCQ; Johnson, Foley, Suengas, & Raye, 1988) and the Aberdeen Report Judgment Scales (ARJS; S. L. Sporer, paper presented at the biennial meeting of the American Psychology-Law Society in Redondo Beach, California, March 1998). Participants generated three accounts. The first account was of an event that participants genuinely experienced in childhood. The second account was of an event that participants did not experience, but merely imagined happened in childhood. The third account was of an event that participants did not experience, but wrote a deceptive account to convince someone else that the event really happened in childhood. Half our participants wrote about positive events and half wrote about negative events. Ratings made by two trained judges indicated that genuine, imagined, and deceptive accounts were qualitatively different on both the MCQ and ARJS. Moreover, based on the MCQ and ARJS scores raters could discriminate whether the events had been genuinely experienced. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings. Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Historically, psychological research on the detection of deception has focused on the non- verbal and physiological cues associated with deception, such as avoiding eye contact and measuring galvanic skin response (Kapardis, 1997). However, lie detection using non- verbal cues is usually little better than chance. For example, Vrij’s (2000) review of approximately 40 studies found that the accuracy rate for detecting lies was only 44%. More recent research has focused on verbal cues; that is, the cues found in the content of people’s statements. In this experiment, we compared the ability of two content analysis tools to discriminate between accounts of genuinely experienced events, accounts of imagined events, and deceptive accounts of not experienced events: the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire (Johnson, Foley, Suengas, & Raye, 1988) and the Aberdeen Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. *Correspondence to: Amanda J. Barnier, School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, NSW 2052, Australia. E-mail: a.barnier@unsw.edu.au Contract/grant sponsors: University of New South Wales; Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship; Australian Research Council Discovery Project; contract/grant number: DP0449447. Contract/grant sponsor: German Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft); contract/grant num- ber: Sp262/3-2.