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Previous studies show that close friends improve at lie detection over time. However, is this improvement due to an increase in the ability to decode the feelings of close friends or a change in how close friends communicate their true and deceptive emotions? In a study of 45 pairs of friends, one friend from each pair (the "sender") was videotaped showing truthful and faked affect in response to pleasant and unpleasant movie clips. The other friend from each pair (the "judge") guessed the true emotions of both the friend and a stranger 1 month and 6 months into the friendship. Judges were better at guessing the true emotions of friends than strangers, and this advantage in judging friends increased among close friends over time. Surprisingly, improvement over time was due mostly to a change in the sender's communication, rather than an increase in judges' ability to decode their friends' feelings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the accuracy of deception judgments, synthesizing research results from 206 documents and 24,483 judges. In relevant studies, people attempt to discriminate lies from truths in real time with no special aids or training. In these circumstances, people achieve an average of 54% correct lie-truth judgments, correctly classifying 47% of lies as deceptive and 61% of truths as nondeceptive. Relative to cross-judge differences in accuracy, mean lie-truth discrimination abilities are nontrivial, with a mean accuracy d of roughly .40. This produces an effect that is at roughly the 60th percentile in size, relative to others that have been meta-analyzed by social psychologists. Alternative indexes of lie-truth discrimination accuracy correlate highly with percentage correct, and rates of lie detection vary little from study to study. Our meta-analyses reveal that people are more accurate in judging audible than visible lies, that people appear deceptive when motivated to be believed, and that individuals regard their interaction partners as honest. We propose that people judge others' deceptions more harshly than their own and that this double standard in evaluating deceit can explain much of the accumulated literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Presents a list of studies that relate to an article about deception judgment which appeared in the August 2006 issue of "Personality & Social Psychology Review."

We analyze the accuracy of deception judgments, synthesizing research results from 206 documents and 24,483 judges. In relevant studies, people attempt to discriminate lies from truths in real time with no special aids or training. In these circumstances, people achieve an average of 54% correct lie–truth judgments, correctly classifying 47% of lies as deceptive and 61% of truths as nondeceptive. Relative to cross-judge differences in accuracy, mean lie-truth discrimination abilities are nontrivial, with a mean accuracy d of roughly .40. This produces an effect that is at roughly the 60th percentile in size, relative to others that have been meta-analyzed by social psychologists. Alternative indexes of lie–truth discrimination accuracy correlate highly with percentage correct, and rates of lie detection vary little from study to study. Our meta-analyses reveal that people are more accurate in judging audible than visible lies, that people appear deceptive when motivated to be believed, and that individuals regard their interaction partners as honest. We propose that people judge others' deceptions more harshly than their own and that this double standard in evaluating deceit can explain much of the accumulated literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an index of codes for documents featured in the August 2006 issue of the journal "Personality & Social Psychology Review."

Presents a response by Bella M. DePaulo and Wendy L. Morris to a letter to the editor regarding their article "Should Singles and the Scholars Who Study Them Make Their Mark or Stay in Their Place?," previously published in the journal "Psychology Inquiry."

We suggest that single adults in contemporary American society are targets of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, a phenomenon we will call singlism. Singlism is an outgrowth of a largely uncontested set of beliefs, the Ideology of Marriage and Family. Its premises include the assumptions that the sexual partnership is the one truly important peer relationship and that people who have such partnerships are happier and more fulfilled than those who do not. We use published claims about the greater happiness of married people to illustrate how the scientific enterprise seems to be influenced by the ideology. We propose that people who are single-particularly women who have always been single-fare better than the ideology would predict because they do have positive, enduring, and important interpersonal relationships. The persistence of singlism is especially puzzling considering that actual differences based on civil (marital) status seem to be qualified and small, the number of singles is growing, and sensitivity to other varieties of prejudice is acute. By way of explanation, we consider arguments from evolutionary psychology, attachment theory, a social problems perspective, the growth of the cult of the couple, and the appeal of an ideology that offers a simple and compelling worldview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accuracy at reading nonverbal cues to emotions was examined for close friends, less close friends, and strangers. Forty-eight senders were videotaped talking about an experience during which they felt either very happy, very sad, or very angry. Half of the time they expressed their emotion clearly, and half of the time they concealed their emotion. Forty-eight judges watched these tapes without sound and attempted to identify the senders' emotions. Each judge watched a videotape of both a platonic friend and a stranger. Overall, friends were more accurate than strangers at identifying the senders' emotions; however, less close friends were better than closer friends at correctly judging concealed sadness and anger. In discussing these findings, we consider models of motivated inaccuracy, accommodatingness, and emotions as calls to action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a pair of studies, college students and community members told autobiographical narratives about the most serious lie they ever told or the most serious lie that was ever told to them. Most serious lies were told by or to participants' closest relationship partners. Participants reported telling their serious lies to get what they wanted or to do what they felt they were entitled to do, to avoid punishment, to protect themselves from confrontation, to appear to be the type of person they wished they were, to protect others, and to hurt others. The degree to which the liars and targets felt distressed about the lies differed significantly across these 7 different types of lies. Systematic variations in the kinds of serious lies described by different subgroups of participants suggest that serious lies may be indicative of the life tasks that are most significant to those groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We discuss the ways in which deception can be used to protect privacy, as well as the ways in which claims to privacy can provide the latitude to lie. In their attempts to maintain their own privacy and their secrets, people can be assisted by others who overlook their lies. Habits of honoring other people's verbal and nonverbal claims about themselves, even when they are not totally convincing, and expectations of similar indulgences from others can keep interactions from getting derailed by small interpersonal bumps. But they also enable exploitation in the form of frauds and scams . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines indirect deception detection by relationship partners. Reason for the low levels of accuracy at detecting deception in people who do not know each other; Average correlation between confidence in one's judgments and the accuracy of those judgments; Link between judges' self-reports of confidence and the actual truthfulness of the messages.

In this longitudinal study, senders told truths and lies to same-sex friends (judges) at both one month and six months into the relationship. Judges guessed whether the stories were truths or lies, and described the cues they used to make their decisions. These cues were coded into categories according to the nature of the cue (verbal, visual, or paralinguistic). Judges mentioned more verbal cues when the story was truthful than when it was fabricated, and mentioned more visual nonverbal cues when it was fabricated than when it was truthful. Therefore, perceivers' stated beliefs about cues discriminated the truths from the lies, although their explicit judgments of deceptiveness did not. Perceivers who mentioned visual or verbal cues more often were not more accurate at detecting deception (explicitly), but those who mentioned paralinguistic cues more often were more accurate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We predicted that socially anxious people who are faced with the prospect of an interpersonal evaluation will act in an inhibited and withdrawn way. Subjects who scored low or high on a measure of social anxiety told four stories about themselves to an interviewer. In the anticipated-evaluation condition, the subjects learned that after they had told their stories, the interviewer would tell them her impressions of them. In the control condition, no mention was made of an evaluation. Judges rated transcripts of the stories. As predicted, socially anxious subjects who thought they were going to be evaluated (relative to anxious subjects in the control condition and nonanxious subjects in both conditions) told shorter stories, and the events in their stories were commonplace rather than unique. Their stories were also less revealing about them as individuals, and less vivid. Contrary to a second prediction, socially anxious subjects who expected to be evaluated did not act any less inhibited or withdrawn when their interviewers were described as very trusting than when they were described as very wary. Implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do people lie more to people they like than to people they dislike? Forty-eight female participants were experimentally induced to like or dislike an art student who had painted one of the paintings that participants liked and one that they disliked. According to their own self-reports and objective measures of the content of the discussions, participants favored the art students they liked with kind lies. When discussing the paintings with liked (compared to disliked) artists, participants conveyed more liking for all of the paintings, exaggerated their liking for the paintings they disliked that were the artists' own work, and were especially unlikely to say explicitly that they disliked those paintings. Participants favored the art students they liked not only by what they said or did not say about the artists' own work, but also by what they communicated about the other artists' work. This was the case even though they liked the paintings equally in both conditions and were explicitly instructed to be polite to all the art students. Judges who watched videotapes of the discussions noticed many of the differences in the ways that participants communicated about paintings that were and were not the artists' own work, but they did not notice differences in communications with the liked versus the disliked artists even though these interactions did objectively differ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has shown both that speech can reliably reveal whether or not deception is occurring and that perceivers are often strongly influenced by speech in their judgments about deceit. Nonetheless, there are relatively few studies of verbal cues to deceit. In the present study, we examined specific verbal and paralinguistic cues that might reveal when deception is occurring or that might be used by perceivers in their attempts to detect deception; also, we examined quantitatively the correspondence between actual cues to deception and perceived cues to deception. For the cues that we studied, the degree to which the cues actually were associated with deception corresponded significantly to the degree to which perceivers used those cues as signs of deceit. When senders pretended to like people they really disliked, their descriptions were less positive and more neutral than when they honestly described people they really did like. When feigning disliking, senders uttered more nonfluences than when expressing honest disliking. All of these cues were used by perceivers in their judgments of deceptiveness; in addition, perceivers judged as deceptive descriptions that were spoken slowly and contained many um's and er's. Expressions of liking that contained many otherreferences, few self-references, and many nonspecific (undifferentiating) descriptors were also perceived to be deceptive. To facilitate the study of actual and perceived cues deception, and their correspondence, a heuristic model was proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychological costs associated with seeking help were studied. The specific helpseeking costs that were addressed included various costs specific to the recipient (e.g., whether receiving the help leads to less credit for successful outcomes), as well as costs associated with the helper (e.g., inconvenience). The findings suggest that persons deciding whether to seek help take into account not only their own costs and rewards but also the cost-reward contingencies of their helper. It was also predicted and found that subjects for whom the expected tasks were especially involving would seek less help, and that subjects who asked for more help would feel less comfortable about approaching the helper and would believe that the helper would perceive them as less competent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents evidence for the specialness of the "baby talk" register. High school students' communication with children, adults, foreigners and mentally retarded adults; Rating of speakers along ten dimensions including friendliness, concern, competence and dominance; Particular listener characteristics that might elicit special communicative styles.

Explores how private expressions of individuals are interpreted by the self, same-sex friends and strangers. Participation of 14 male and 14 female undergraduates; Stimulus materials; Measure of nonverbal sensitivity between friends and between strangers; Sex differences.

Presents information on a study which investigated the development of the ability to detect deception among subjects ranging from sixth graders to college students. Dimensions used to assess subjects' ability to detect deception; Control of potential differences in the use of the ratings scales; Judgments of mixed feelings of subjects.

Perspective theory argues that the relationship between the rating of an attitude and the content of the attitude is mediated by the rater's judgmental perspective-the content he or she associates with the end points of the attitude rating scale. In most previous studies of perspective as a mediator of self-rating, perspective has been experimentally manipulated and effects on attitude ratings demonstrated using relatively uninvolving attitude issues. The one study using nonexperimental data employed a theoretically inadequate singly-parameter measure of perspective. The present study was designed to test the effects of naturally occurring perspectives on attitude ratings, using a relatively involving issue and an appropriate two-parameter measure of perspective. Results in the direction predicted by perspective theory were obtained for two different samples of subjects. The hypothesis that judgmental perspective would be related to the attitude position of important reference groups was generally not supported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dispositionally expressive and unexpressive male subjects told truths and lies under low and high scrutiny. Subjects acted expressive, inhibited, and naturally. Judges rated subjects' performances. Subjects were able to regulate their expressiveness deliberately, but they were less successful when more highly scrutinized. Dispositionally expressive subjects appeared more expressive and attractive than unexpressive subjects. Unlike unexpressive subjects, they did not appear any less attractive when trying to act inhibited than when trying to act expressive, nor did they appear any more deceptive when lying than when telling the truth. Unexpressive people, even when trying to act expressive, did not appear as expressive as expressive people when the latter were acting naturally. Similarly, expressive people, even when trying to act inhibited, did not appear as inhibited as the unexpressive people acting naturally. Differences in expressiveness were conveyed most compellingly in channels that included nonverbal cues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When people are motivated to tell an effective lie, they are less successful when others can observe their nonverbal cues. It was predicted that expectations for success would moderate this motivational impairment effect, such that it would occur primarily when expectations were low. Ninety-six women who thought of themselves as very independent told two stories (one true, one fabricated) that illustrated their dependence and two that illustrated independence to an interviewer described as very trusting (high expectations for success) or very wary (low expectations). They either expected to be evaluated by the interviewer (high importance of success) or did not (low importance).Judges rated the sincerity of each story. As predicted, participants' lies were especially detectable (in relation to their truths) when it was important to the participants to succeed but they had low expectations for success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Are physically attractive people more skilled than unattractive people at distinguishing truth from deception? To address this question, we showed videotapes of truthful and deceptive messages to 102 males and females classified as low, medium, or high in attractiveness. The speakers shown on the tapes were telling truths and lies to attractive or unattractive listeners of the same or opposite sex. The lies that the speakers told to attractive listeners were generally easier to detect than were the lies that they told to unattractive listeners. The lies told to attractive listeners were even more accurately identified by subjects who were themselves of average or high attractiveness (as defined by the ratings made by their peers) than by those who were unattractive. Conversely, the lies told to unattractive listeners were relatively more accurately detected by subjects who were unattractive than by those who were moderately attractive or very attractive. These findings are consistent with a skill-specificity formulation. The role of practice and experience in the development of skill at detecting deception is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Subjects, 22 males and 22 females, observed a videotape of 6 males and 6females who were sometimes lying and sometimes telling the truth. Subjects were instructed to pay special attention to the tone of voice, the words, or the visual cues of the senders, or were given no special attentional instructions (control condition). Subjects told to pay particular attention to the tone of voice were significantly more successful at distinguishing truth from deception than subjects in the control condition. Further analyses showed that the instructions to subjects to attend to tone significantly increased the degree to which they rated the truthful messages as truthful, but it did not increase the degree to which the;' rated the deceptive messages as deceptive. It was suggested that tone of voice cues may be particularly informative to perceivers making judgments of truthfulness, and that perceivers do not always take full advantage of the cues that are available to them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Androgynous, sex-typed, and undifferentiated subjects predicted the responses of androgynous, sex-typed, and undifferentiated others to masculine, feminine, and neutral situations. The self-report criterion data replicated the findings of Helmreich, Spence, & Holahan (1979). In accordance with Cronbach's (1955) suggestion, separate correlational measures of person accuracy, situation accuracy, and person-by-situation accuracy were computed. Subjects were more accurate at predicting person effects and situation effects than person-by-situation interactions. Females-particularly feminine-typed females-were best at making person predictions, while males-particularly masculine-typed and androgynous males were best at making situation predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study explored the relationship between help-seeking and sensitivity to covert and overt nonverbal cues of emotion. In a help-seeking context, covert cues (cues one is trying to hide) would often include signs of annoyance and inconvenience expressed by a potential helper, while overt cues (cues one is trying to convey) would include polite signs of compliance and willingness to give aid. It was hypothesized and found that individuals who seek help readily, compared to those who are more reluctant to ask for help, are relatively more sensitive to overt emotional cues than to covert emotional cues. The implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over 300 subjects at four different age levels predicted situational variations in two different self-reported responses of persons asking for help. Accuracy at this task was substantially better than chance. Subjects were more accurate in predicting the importance to askers of getting help than their feelings about asking for help. Predictions of importance were relatively more accurate in same-sex giver-asker dyads, while predictions of feelings were relatively more accurate in opposite-sex dyads. Females were more accurate predictors than males, and they were more accurately judged than males. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The structure of skill at decoding nonverbal cues was examined for 150 high school students and 95 college students. An overall principal components analysis yielded four factors differing in the complexity of the message (pure versus mixed) and in the relative importance of the video versus the audio modality. Factor 1 (pure video) was defined by accuracy at face and body cues of ordinary (2 second) and very brief exposure length. Factor 2 (mixed video) was defined by accuracy at face and body cues with a "noisy" background. Factor 3 (mixed audio) was defined by accuracy at decoding discrepant cues and "noisy" audio cues. Factor 4 (ure audio) was defined by accuracy at pure tone of voice cues. The overall evidence suggested that despite a nontrivial degree of relationship among all measures of skill at decoding nonverbal cues (Armor's Theta = .62), it would increase our theoretical and empirical precision to conceptualize nonverbal decoding ability as made up of several relatively unrelated subskills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluates David Buller and Judee Burgoon's interpersonal deception theory and research. Reservations regarding interpersonal deception theory; Concerns about the methodological and substantive adequacy of the research; Contributions of Buller and Burgoon to the discipline.

Studies age differences in reactions to help in a peer tutoring context. Positive socio-emotional outcomes that characterize peer tutoring dyads; Analysis of key issues of interest; Implications on child development.

Discusses the scientific conceptualization of the idea of rapport. Centrality of mutuality and interactiveness; Consideration of genuine rapport versus pseudorapport; Departure of rapport from its purest form; Occurrence of rapport in interactions that appear to be characterized more by solemnity, somberness or distress; Isolation of specific nonverbal behaviors.

Presents a meta-analysis of research on the relation between judges' accuracy at detecting deception and their confidence in their judgements. Correlation between accuracy and confidence in the detection of deception; Methodological and theoretical explanations for the findings.

Two studies examined adults' willingness to accept help from children. In Study 1 adults were less willing to accept free art lessons from competent children than from competent adults. Help-acceptance from children was not increased by suggesting to subjects that by accepting the lessons they would help the children to become better teachers of art. Study 2 replicated the latter finding, and also examined certain personality correlates of help-accepting, including self-esteem, need for approval, and sex-typing. Women were more likely to accept help than men, and subjects scoring high on the femininity scale of Spence's Personal Attributes Questionnaire accepted help more than subjects scoring low on that scale. Self-esteem and need for approval were useful moderator variables. Often, different relationships between help-accepting and other variables were obtained for subjects scoring high on self-esteem or need for approval than for subjects scoring lo won those variables. Social implications of adults' reluctance to accept help from children are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A meta-analysis was conducted of research on the relation between judges' accuracy at detecting deception and their confidence in their judgments. A total of 18 independent samples revealed an average weighted accuracy-confidence correlation of .04, a relation not significantly different from zero. However, confidence was positively correlated with judges' tendency to perceive messages as truthful, regardless of the actual truthfulness of the messages. Judges were also more confident when they really were rating truths compared to when they were rating lies. Also, men were more confident than women, and judges who had a closer relationship to the message sender felt more confident in their judgments of truths and lies. Methodological and theoretical explanations for these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Experiments on behavioral lie detection have indicated that observers can detect a communicator's lies with above-chance accuracy, and that detection accuracy may be enhanced when observers pay special attention to certain vocal and body-movement cues. The present experiment asked whether deception in (simulated) sales communications by retail salespersons and automobile customers could likewise be detected nonverbally. Contrary to much of the prior literature, deception-detection in this study was not above chance, apparently because the salespersons' and customers' nonverbal cues simply were not correlated with lying. Though the observers seemed quite suspicious and did not give communicators the ‘benefit of the doubt,’ they could not discriminate the communicators' deceptive communications from their truthful ones. Many—perhaps most—of the lies in sales communications may be told by confident, well- practiced deceivers whose nonverbal behavior is unlikely to reveal their lying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of on-the-job experience in fostering skill at detecting deception was examined. A deception-detection test was administered to three samples of more than 100 subjects each: a group of undergraduates with no special experiences at detecting deceit; a group of new recruits to a federal law enforcement training program, who had some limited on-the-job experience at detecting deceit; and a group of advanced federal law enforcement officers, with years of experience working at jobs in which the detection of deception is very important. Although the officer samples were more confident about their judgments of deceptiveness than were the students, they were no more accurate than the students. None of the three groups showed a significant improvement in deception-detection success from the first half to the second half of the test; however, the advanced officers left increasingly confident about their performance as they progressed through the test Correlational analyses of the relationship between accuracy and confidence provided further evidence that experience does not improve people's awareness of the accuracy or inaccuracy of their judgments. The findings from this research are compared to the results of research on other kinds of professional decision-makers (e.g., clinical psychologists), and several Theoretical perspectives on the role of experience in decision making are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]