Can You Really Separate the Liars from the Truth-Tellers?

Face illusion photo, take a look at the word the face spells

From Denny: Seems the deception researchers think they are on to something in the ongoing search to separate the liars from the nervous who appear to be lying but are not during interviews or interrogations. Most people don't bear up well under interrogation and are understandably nervous, appearing to be guilty when actually they are not. Therefore, the usual "tells" of nervousness or shifty eyes is not enough to determine a liar. You require more than that to make a sound judgment about the veracity of what the subject is telling you.

Scientists have a new theory they think works and it's called "cognitive load." We all know that lying (for most people) is mentally taxing just to keep up with a consistency of the lie over time. You know, get your story line straight. So, scientists think the trick to do while interrogating someone is to ask them to perform a task while lying - or telling the truth - and it will become evident which it is because lying is supposed to be more taxing on the liars.

I doubt how well this theory will hold up; I certainly have known what could be termed professional liars and they demonstrate complete ease at lying. "If their lips are moving; they're lying" is our motto. This theory may work for the majority of the population and in certain cultures. Time will tell as it is tested worldwide.

The researchers are in England and here is what they set up as a study to test their theory: One group was asked to lie convincingly and the other group was told to tell the truth. The story line was about a staged theft scenario that only the truth tellers had actually experienced.

Then the researchers, led by psychologist Aldert Vrij of the University of Portsmouth in England (a completely different culture than in America), brought in a second pair of groups to do exactly the same but with an added condition: they had to maintain eye contact while relating their stories.

When the researchers took the videotapes back to the lab to examine for "tells" and cognitive load they did find some interesting facts. Verbal signs of cognitive load were displayed as fewer spatial details in the suspects' stories. Nonverbal signs of cognitive load were displayed as fewer eye blinks. Eye blinks, you say? Yes, eye blinks when rapid suggest nervousness; fewer blinks are a "tell" displaying cognitive load. So, guess how this is useful? Liars blink less. (I could have told you that and saved you a few million dollars...)

How did the eye contact figure in? It was subtle according to this experiment but did manage to define and magnify the difference between the liars and the truth-tellers.

What to watch for when you try to apply this new theory? Be aware some people naturally blink less than others, so you really need to spend some time getting to know a person before placing them in a stress situation to determine if they are lying or not. Other people have such good and disciplined minds they can carry the cognitive load better than others can. In short, you better actually know the person before you place them in a situation like this because individual differences muddled some of the group results here.

Conclusion

Use this theory as a general baseline to measure the liars in your life. It isn't foolproof or totally accurate like most generalizations. It will help you to grow in your own emotional intelligence about relating to other people.

And, remember, some people appear to be lying because they are withholding private information. Keep that in mind when trying to determine if a person is lying to you: what is their agenda for lying? Are they private people? Are they philanderers? Are they embarrassed for others to realize they are not quite as important as they boast to others?

There are a lot of reasons people lie. Gamblers lie about what they had for breakfast afraid you will nail them down as to where they actually were at a certain time of day and the wife may find out. Other people lie to enhance their status in life and don't want to be found out. Some people lie just to appear more interesting and worthy to others. People are people; love them any way! :)



Written by Denny Lyon
Copyright 4 August 2009
All Rights Reserved



Source: Scientific American



England, University of Portsmouth, Society and Culture, science, research, Eye contact, Cognition, Social Sciences, Psychology, Cognitive load, Emotional intelligence, eye contact, cognitive science

Brain: Study Eyes Autism and Brain Size

Image by alles-schlumpf via Flickr

From Denny: Published 4 May 2009 in the Archives of General Psychiatry is a new study about the brain size in autistic small children. The study was done at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

What part of the brain did researchers focus?

There is a region deep in the brain that helps control emotions. It also regulates attention and reads social cues from eye contact. This region of the brain is called the amygdala.

Who was studied?

The scientists studied two-year-olds with and without autism.

What did these researchers find?

What was quite a surprise is that autistic children exhibited a more enlarged amygdala where non-autistic children did not. This unusual distinction persisted in the follow-up screening of these same children two years later.

How is this study helpful?

For autism researchers this study adds insight into the brain size anomalies of autism and could help doctors diagnose autism.

Most of all, this study could help develop new interventions that help strengthen young childrens' social functioning.

Written by Denny Lyon

4 Health Articles You Might Enjoy

From Denny: I'm always finding the most interesting articles about the latest health study. Too bad there wasn't more research devoted to orphan diseases, ones that afflict a small percentage of the population. Read that as the drug companies believe they can't make big money by searching for cures for these diseases - so they do nothing. Maybe it's the role of international governments to get into the act to help the suffering sectors of humanity? What do you think?

Health is a large area to cover so if you have some suggestions of anything I might be overlooking and you want to throw out at me, please do! You can also email me: warriorspearl@gmail.com too if you like. Yes, I actually answer my own email and am not too full of myself - well, not yet, anyway...! :) (There goes that cheeky side escaping again...)

Here are a few articles you might find an interesting read:

Drink Coffee: Lower Risk of Uterine Cancer

Broccoli Sprouts May Be Germ Fighters

The Pill and Gaining Muscle

Popping a Zit Can Kill You?

Photo by left-hand @ flickr

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Brain: Is my brain making me buy things I don't need?

Image by alles-schlumpf via Flickr

From Denny: This is a really cool article from How Stuff Works about the brain chemistry of spenders vs. non-spenders. Now if they just had a blood test for this when you are first getting married it would solve a lot of future money arguments that often bring about divorce...

"If your jaw drops every month when your credit card bill arrives, as if you couldn't possibly have spent that much money and surely someone stole your card for a couple of hours and then snuck it back into your wallet without you noticing, you may not be that far off. Research published in January 2007 reveals that the brain chemistry of spenders and non-spenders, in the moments before a purchase, is so different that scientists are able to predict with pretty much complete certainty whether a person is going to buy an item or walk away from it. In essence, if you're a chronic spender, your brain is stealing your credit card and then sneaking it back in your wallet after buying a new 60" plasma TV.

Okay, so it's not exactly like that -- your brain chemistry is part of what makes you who you are. But the results of the study, published in the January 4 issue of the journal Neuron, imply that spenders have a chemical propensity to spend; and the thriftier among us experience chemical processes at the moment of potential purchase that make them far more likely to return an item to the shelf and leave the store empty handed. It's not a "get out of debt free" card, but it does help explain why some people can't seem to resist the urge to buy, while others seemingly wouldn't spend the money if their life depended on it."

by Julia Layton

For the rest of this interesting article, go here.

MRI Lie Detection to Get First Day in Court

"Defense attorneys are for the first time submitting a next-generation lie-detection test as evidence in court.

In an upcoming juvenile-sex-abuse case in San Diego, the defense is hoping to get an MRI scan, which shows activity levels based on oxygen levels in the brain, admitted to prove the abuse didn't happen.

The technology is used widely in brain research, but hasn't been fully tested as a lie-detection method. To be admitted into court, any technique has to be "generally accepted" within the scientific community...

Laboratory studies using fMRI, which measures blood-oxygen levels in the brain, have suggested that when someone lies, the brain sends more blood to the ventrolateral area of the prefrontal cortex.

In a very small number of studies, researchers have identified lying in study subjects with accuracy ranging from 76 percent to over 90 percent (.pdf). But some scientists and lawyers like Greely doubt that those results will prove replicable outside the lab setting, and others say it just isn't ready yet."

From Denny: We are forever chasing after ways to detect deceit. Just think Wall Street would have never taken us to the cleaners... but I digress. According to this interesting article this MRI version of the lie detector test could be vulnerable to a host of things:

"Ed Vul, an fMRI researcher at the Kanwisher Lab at MIT, said that it was simply too easy for a suspect to make fMRI data of any type unusable.

"I don't think it can be either reliable or practical. It is very easy to corrupt fMRI data," Vul said. "The biggest difficulty is that it's very easy to make fMRI data unusable by moving a little, holding your breath, or even thinking about a bunch of random stuff."

A trained defendant might even be able to introduce bias into the fMRI data. In comparison with traditional lie-detection methods, fMRI appears more susceptible to gaming."

By Alexis Madrigal

Some guesses as to how the Mozart effort might work

"One of my best friends in college played music incessantly—whether he was studying, writing papers, completing organic chemistry problem sets, or swilling down cheap beer, whatever he did was accompanied by a nonstop 1980s synth-pop beat. This apparently did him no harm, because after graduating at the top of his class, he went on to get a PhD and a law degree, with full scholarships paying for both.

"I could never study with him because the music always broke my concentration. I preferred to study to the gentle background noise of the campus coffee shop. There was one exception to this rule: when I was writing a paper, I would always play Mozart's Piano Concerto #23. Perhaps it was just superstition, but I really believed it helped me concentrate. Even playing a Mozart symphony did not produce the same effect for me—only the piano music worked.

A few years after I graduated from college, the research of Rauscher et al. appeared to back up my superstition—listening to Mozart's piano music actually raised spatial IQ scores."

By Dave Munger

From Denny: Everyone's brain is hard-wired differently. I've always loved Mozart as well as other kinds of music. My own take is that the mental complexity of Mozart - and some other music - combined with how it engages a person emotionally creates a bridge of union in the brain, therefore making it easier to complete tasks well by blocking access to chaotic random interferences in the immediate environment.

For instance, many people find it annoying when their thoughts are interrupted by a sudden staccato burst of conversation coming into their work environment. I always figured it was because it was random and in irregular timing it was distracting to the brain, therefore annoying to the emotions. Music is timed with a regular beat, engaging the emotions so the brain functions better.

"That's my story and I'm sticking to it!" :)

Photo by pfly @ flickr (Scriabin's musical score)

How distractible are you? The answer may lie in your working memory capacity

"Some people, however, seem to be able to be incredibly productive despite a huge number of distractions -- Twitter status updates, email, crying babies, you name it. Indeed, some people can't work well if things are too quiet. For them, uninterrupted silence is more distracting than cacophony.

But whatever their working environment, it's clear that some people are simply better at focusing on the task at hand. What makes people's minds more or less likely to wander? Several studies point to working memory capacity as the key."

By Dave Munger

From Denny: Bummer! This sounds like you're basically screwed if you are unable to increase your working memory capacity. This might explain the issue with ADD disorder and the immature brain.

In the end, a lot of factors go into our ability to focus for long periods of time and do so in a riveted fashion until the project is completed - like do you eat right in order to feed your brain.

This study makes me wonder that when the mind wanders it is really resting itself and resetting its working memory capacity, sort of like flushing the cache of the useless and resetting to a cleaner environment. Just my speculative thoughts...

Photo by d3 Dan @ flickr

How do you react to an emotional face? Depends on how quickly you see it

"What's your first reaction on seeing this picture of Nora? Are you excited because she appears to be excited? Or do you react to her intent? Perhaps you think she's cute, or maybe even sarcastic. Ultimately you might have all of those reactions.

There's no doubt we're exceptionally fast at responding to faces, and to the emotions they convey. But reacting appropriately, especially when a face signals danger, could be the difference between life and death.

These two ways of reacting to a facial expression correspond to two possible intentions of an expression: to elicit an emotion in someone else, or to express your own emotional state."

By Dave Munger

From Denny: Boy! Talk about making snap judgments about a person or a situation! According to these guys, it's all wrapped up in how quickly the brain noticed something affects interpretation of your own mood as well. Definitely food for thought.

Psychology

Psychology - "Are there any good things about psychology? If so then what are they? These are some questions that often ask by people who are curious and interested about psychology and about studying it. I have done a good research in order to answer these questions and below I have enumerated them all."

By raymondphillippe

Thought about studying in the field of psychology? This writer has given you some ideas of where to start and what to consider.