Abstract
It is commonly assumed that behavior reflects the mental states of individuals. However, recent attempts to detect human states of mind via behavioral indicators have not always been successful; behavioral indicators may be unreliable and invalid. In this study we show that one of the common behavioral indicators, change in the overall amount of movement, correlated well with changes in the skin conductance level (SCL) at the group level, which reflects changes in arousal. At the individual level, however, changes in the SCL were related to movement patterns only in about half of the individuals. It is also noteworthy that the level of movement-SCL correlation was very highly predictable by certain social and cognitive characteristics of the individuals. Our results suggest that behavioral indicators may in many cases fail to predict mental states at the individual level.
Highlights
In everyday life we often need to predict future behaviors and states of mind of other persons
If our results would support the idea that changes in arousal level are expressed in changes in motor activity only in a subset of individuals, we would need to demonstrate that the individual differences we find are real and not caused by some technical problem of the study instead
We have developed several novel measures, among them is trajectory mass (TM), that has intuitively clear meaning and characterizes the state of movement very well
Summary
In everyday life we often need to predict future behaviors and states of mind of other persons. Shopkeepers try to spot thieves before they steal something, airport security looks for signs to identify potential terrorists, each of us is interested in recognizing liars or noticing that loved ones are stressed. People make such predictions without knowing exactly on what basis they are doing it. The United States Transportation Security Administration (TSA) runs a program called Screening Passengers by Observation Technique to identify potential terrorists. It is noteworthy that errors in detecting deception do not emerge because people rely on wrong cues; the problem seems to be in behavioral cues to deception that are not reliable (Hartwig and Bond, 2011)
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