How to tell when someone lies

How can we tell who’s lying, who’s not? New research out of Stephen Porter’s Forensic Psychology Lab at Dalhousie University determines the face will betray the deceiver’s true emotion, but not in the stereotypical ways we think.

In making a public appeal for the safe return of his missing wife, Michael White broke down in tears and sobbed.

“My wife is a good person, never hurts anybody. If she’s out there and you see me or you see this, just stay out there and we’ll find you,’ said the tearful husband, sitting on the sofa in his living room in Edmonton after his pregnant wife Liana White disappeared in July 2005. Canadians watching his plea couldn’t help but be moved by the plight of the distressed man.

Three days later, flashes of anger broke through his sadness when talking with reporters. He said he was so frustrated with the police investigation that he was going to go and find his wife himself. He led volunteer searchers directly to her body in a ditch on the outskirts of the city, and was immediately arrested by police.

He’d been lying all along. Michael White was charged and convicted with second-degree murder and committing an indignity to a dead body.

How can we tell who’s lying, who’s not? New research out of Stephen Porter’s Forensic Psychology Lab at Dalhousie University determines the face will betray the deceiver’s true emotion, but not in the stereotypical ways we think. It’s not the shifty eyes or sweaty brow or an elongated nose (à la Pinocchio) the lie detector should look for. Instead, other elements of a liar’s face will give them away – “cracking” briefly and allowing displays of true emotion to leak on to the face. In fact, when Porter and his team analyzed White’s plea frame by frame, they found hints of anger and disgust in his face, not noticed by most of the supportive public.

“The face and its musculature are so complex—so much more complex than anywhere else in our external bodies,” says Leanne ten Brinke, a graduate student in experimental psychology who collaborated on the new research. “There are some muscles in the face you can’t control … and those muscles won’t be activated in the absence of genuine emotion—you just can’t do it.”

Adds Dr. Porter: “If someone is telling a really important lie in which the consequences are dire, say life imprisonment, the lie will be revealed anyway. Because unlike body language, you can’t monitor or completely control what’s going on your face. This research was the first detailed experimental demonstration of the secrets revealed when people put on a “false face,” faking or inhibiting various universal emotions.”

An article based on their research, “Reading between the Lies: Identifying Concealed and Falsified Emotions in Universal Facial Expressions,” appears in the May issue of Psychological Science. The research is the first comprehensive study of the secrets revealed by the human face for four of the universal emotions: happiness, sadness, disgust, and fear. They also tested a hypothesis originating with Charles Darwin in 1872—that there are certain specific facial actions that cannot be created just because we want them to. As well, facial actions may be involuntarily expressed in the presence of a genuine emotion. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin noted: “A man when moderately angry, or even when enraged, may command the movements of his body, but … those muscles of the face which are least obedient to the will, will sometimes alone betray a slight and passing emotion.”

In conducting the research, Dr. Porter and Ms. ten Brinke enlisted adult participants to view images that ranged from happy (puppies playing) to fearful (a close-up of open-mouthed rabid dog) and disgusting (a severed hand) and were instructed to respond with genuine or deceptive emotional expressions. (For example, they’d be directed to smile when viewing the severed-hand photo.) Their reactions were watched and judged by other volunteer observers, who could not see the corresponding images, and recorded on video. The 697 emotion clips were exhaustively analyzed frame by frame for more than 100,000 frames.

The results were that no one participant was able to falsify emotions perfectly. Odd or out-of-place expressions—such as smirking or rapid blinking in a supposedly sad face—were more likely to show up when the participant was attempting to be deceptive. Some emotions were harder to falsify than others: happiness is easier to fake than disgust or fear.

The researchers were able to discern rare “microexpressions,” flashes of true emotion that show briefly, from one-fifth to one-25th of a second, on the faces of participants when instructed to deceive.

“The facial expression appears to crack and another emotion leaks on the face, however briefly,” says Ms. ten Brinke. “When you see a facial expression like this, you’ve got to probe with questions to find out why the person is feeling this way.” The authors noted that most flashes of inconsistent emotion usually showed in either the upper or lower face only. Further, meaningless muscle twitches sometimes occurred even in genuine expressions, meaning that correct interpretation can only occur by following up with the right questions.

Detecting liars is a tricky business and one that most people—especially people who are highly motivated to catch liars—are particularly bad at.

“There are all kinds of potential applications for this research, from our daily lives to settings like police interrogations, security checks in airports and courtrooms,” says Dr. Porter. “Everyone’s trying to figure out who’s telling the truth, who’s not … we’re just so sick of being lied to.”

The next step in the research is examining the faces of known liars, liars like Michael White, who’ve fabricated stories and made highly publicized appeals. Ms. ten Brinke and Dr. Porter have collected and are analyzing more than 60 videos of such real-life, high-stakes cases from Canada, the United States, Britain and Australia.

“It’s to try and give the police a more objective look at whether people in these kinds of situations might be lying,” Ms. ten Brinke explains.

It seems the face does reveal all.

www.sciencedaily.com

Can't let my parents read that! It would ruin my life.

Only if they're going to record your face and play it back frame by frame to see if you were lying.

I tend to believe that people can condition themselves to evade this sort of detection. Same for the traditional lie-detector tests.

According to the article, there are muscles in your face that you simply cannot control.

Muscles that you cannot control directly, but you can artificially alter your emotion. For instance, an actor may remember a really sad time to portray sadness; the sadness is real, just not for the reason those that see it will think.

Good point.

Thats not a point at all.
He WAS crying and sobbing the story says.
You can be sad about previous emotions all you want, the fact is you cannot mask the anger and disgust.

Good point.

I don't know. Actors train themselves to get caught up in the moment so to speak. And if you trained yourself to mask the receding emotion of anger persay completely, then the emotion you're trying to pull off will work.

Thats not a point at all. He WAS crying and sobbing the story says. You can be sad about previous emotions all you want, the fact is you cannot mask the anger and disgust.

He might have been crying for a reason that was not his wife's disappearance. That is what WW is trying to say.

without reading all of that, when I'm talking with a friend or something and I feel he/she is lying I start asking tons of questions, not directly, but indirectly and keep record in my own head of this, and try to peice together their story best I can until I determine if they are in fact lying, or not.

Thats not a point at all. He WAS crying and sobbing the story says. You can be sad about previous emotions all you want, the fact is you cannot mask the anger and disgust.

I'd be pissed if someone killed my pregnant wife. I understand it was in fact he that killed her, but I could understand the emotions of "anger and disgust" being displayed.

At that point, her status was "missing." The only way he'd be angry at her death was if he murdered her.

Which would prove that he was lying about his innocence.

Good article Mj.

Yay Asamin you just proved a fact we already knew! : )

But anyway, I've heard some ways to detect lies but this one is interesting.

At that point, her status was "missing." The only way he'd be angry at her death was if he murdered her.

Well, if he was wife was missing you don't think he would think it was odd that his wife disappeared for long enough to be categorized as that? If you're on good terms with your significant other then that thought could very easily pass through your mind. That is if you're not a robot .

But again, he wouldn't have reason to be angry, yet. And they are classified as missing when someone reports them missing, in this case the husband.

Okay, I see your point but I suppose you don't see mine. It's pretty silly for me to talk any longer about a fellow's emotions, seeing as ...they're his and only his. Arguing with you is seriously like arguing with a robot .