Can Emotional Awareness of Liars Influence Deception Detection Effectiveness?

Abstract

Emotional awareness is defined as the ability to cognitively process emotional arousal and the expression thereof. When telling a lie, emotional awareness comes into play: the most important objective is to conceal one’s true emotions and fabricate false ones; simultaneously, however, one must control for the affective state of those who are to believe the falsehood; via such efforts, one can assess the potential for success in the deceit. With this in mind, we hypothesized that emotional awareness may play a vital role in the process of creating a convincing lie. Study participants (Group A, N = 40) were asked to complete the Polish adaptation of the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) and record videos consisting of plotting some truth or lie, which were then rated as true or false by 400 volunteers (Group B). Both samples (Group A and Group B) were recruited among students attending Polish universities. The results allowed us to confirm correlational relationships between emotional awareness (general, self-awareness, and awareness of others’ emotions) and the effectiveness of the deception. We were also able to confirm previous studies’ results about the truth bias in detecting lies and gender differences in emotional awareness.

Notes

1 A software platform which allows an individual to build a survey, distribute it, and gather the data: www.qualtrics.com.

2 In such a case, they would be asked to randomly draw another topic. However, as the list of topics was specifically created to concern only nonthreatening, everyday life subjects (before inclusion, they were read and rated by several psychology students who did not take part in the actual study), this situation never took place.

3 Software enabling the creation and editing of videos.