An experiment to assess emotional and physiological arousal and personality correlates while imagining deceit

Abstract

In order to examine how personality traits, emotional arousal and physiological arousal affect deception confidence, students (N = 102) completed the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire–Revised (EPQ–R) as well as stress and deception tasks while their heart rate variability was measured. Findings indicated psychoticism did not moderate how physiologically aroused participants were while viewing emotionally salient stimuli (video of a road traffic accident) or the thought of enacting deceit, although this came close to significance. However, participants (particularly males) higher in psychoticism reported less subjective distress after imagining enacting deceit than those lower on psychoticism. Extroversion had no impact on physiological arousal when viewing emotionally salient stimuli or thinking about enacting deceit. However, extroverts reported more subjective distress after thinking about enacting deceit than introverts. Also, deception confidence was not correlated to any of these variables. Future research could examine a sample higher in psychoticism and how this trait impacts deception confidence.

Key words:

• deception
• emotional arousal
• extroversion
• heart rate variability
• lying
• physiological arousal
• psychoticism

Ethical standards

Declaration of conflicts of interest

Candice McBain has declared no conflicts of interest.

Grant J. Devilly has declared no conflicts of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee [add as appropriate] and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Ethical approval was obtained from the Griffith University Human Ethics Research Committee (GU Ref No: PSY/70/14/HREC).

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study

Transparency declaration

The lead author affirms that this manuscript is an honest, accurate and transparent account of the study being reported; that no important aspects of the study have been omitted; and that any discrepancies from the study as planned have been explained.

Authors’ contributions

Grant J. Devilly contributed to the larger research programme, designed the research, obtained ethics clearance, analysed the data and wrote the manuscript. Candice McBain contributed to the larger research programme, designed the research, obtained ethics clearance, collected and transformed the data, assisted with data analysis and wrote the manuscript.

Licence to publish

Exclusive licence to publish this article is given.