Abstract
Processing facial emotion, especially mismatches between facial and verbal messages, is believed to be important in the detection of deception. For example, emotional leakage may accompany lying. Individuals with superior emotion perception abilities may then be more adept in detecting deception by identifying mismatch between facial and verbal messages. Two personal factors that may predict such abilities are female gender and high emotional intelligence (EI). However, evidence on the role of gender and EI in detection of deception is mixed. A key issue is that the facial processing skills required to detect deception may not be the same as those required to identify facial emotion. To test this possibility, we developed a novel facial processing task, the FDT (Face Decoding Test) that requires detection of inconsistencies between facial and verbal cues to emotion. We hypothesized that gender and ability EI would be related to performance when cues were inconsistent. We also hypothesized that gender effects would be mediated by EI, because women tend to score as more emotionally intelligent on ability tests. Data were collected from 210 participants. Analyses of the FDT suggested that EI was correlated with superior face decoding in all conditions. We also confirmed the expected gender difference, the superiority of high EI individuals, and the mediation hypothesis. Also, EI was more strongly associated with facial decoding performance in women than in men, implying there may be gender differences in strategies for processing affective cues. It is concluded that integration of emotional and cognitive cues may be a core attribute of EI that contributes to the detection of deception.
Highlights
Lying and deception are highly pervasive [1]
Ekman and Friesen [4] pointed out that in order to deceive others her/his inner state, the liar can 1) simulate an emotional expression when s/he does not feel any emotion 2) mask emotion that s/he really feels with another emotional expression or 3) try to neutralize emotion s/he feels by showing neutral expression
In the inconsistent emotions equation, no single predictor was significant. These analyses suggest that emotion perception may play the most important role in processing basic emotions, but the relationship between emotional intelligence (EI) and processing of inconsistent emotional expressions is best attributed to EI as a whole, rather than any particular branch
Summary
Lying and deception are highly pervasive [1]. DePaulo et al.’s [2] classic diary study suggested that almost everybody lies at least once a week, and about 30% of lies regard feelings. People tell lies to pretend that they feel better than they do or to signal agreement with their partners. The verbal message should be coherent with nonverbal signals. Fake emotional expression may be accompanied by emotional ‘‘leakage’’. Even people adept at masking and simulating emotion cannot prevent leakage of real emotions [5]. Emotional leakage has been demonstrated in studies of micro-expressions. According to Ekman [7], deception may be accompanied by a brief (,1/15 s) facial expression of emotion inconsistent with the speaker’s statements. Speakers may have various motivations for concealing emotion Such motivations are not necessarily deceptive, but deception may be one of the main contexts in which inconsistent microexpressions are expressed [8,9]
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