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Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST) (Carstensen, 1992, 1993) accounts for lifespan changes in human social networks and for the motivations which underlie those changes. SST is applied in this research with 256 prison inmates and non-inmates, ages 18-84, from Mississippi, Kansas, and New Mexico. Two research questions sought to identify (a) whether inmate networks change in size, and (b) whether overall closeness within an inmate's network changes over the adult years. Results indicate that older inmates, much like older non-inmates, have few peripheral partners, are buffered from the wider population of prisoners, and interact within a small group of very close partners. Although older inmates are not completely isolated, they do maintain fewer network partners as age increases, like their non-incarcerated counterparts, and overall are as emotionally close to network members as non-inmates.

Levine and McCornack (1992) found that persons who have a truth-bias (those who tend to believe that most messages are truthful) exhibit low detection accuracy, that moderately suspicious people are more accurate at detecting, and suggested that lie-bias persons would be as inaccurate at detecting lies as those who are truth-biased. This study tested Levine and McCornack’s suggestion that lie-biased people would be inaccurate deception detectors by conducting field experiments in Kansas and New Mexico prisons. Results indicate that prisoners are lie-biased and are accurate detectors of lies but not truths, and findings suggest a reversed veracity effect in prison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]