ASPECTOS RURALES ( LOS RECURSOS NATURALES Y EL MEDIO AMBIEN TE )

Two participants had provided informed consent in the previous study, and ‘Eyes For Lies’ consented to the use of data from her blog. The two participants attended at a psychology laboratory at the University of Liverpool, and were interviewed individually. Participation lasted between one and a half, and two hours. The participants were informed that the aim of the study was to identify the cues that they had used to distinguish between honest and deceptive appealers in the previous

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study, which had taken place several months before. The criteria for the selection of cases included in the study are discussed fully in Chapter 5. See Appendix 3 for case summaries of the appeals. The two participants were informed that they would watch the same video footage of people making appeals for missing or murdered relatives as they had in the previous study, and would be asked to make comments as they occurred to them, about anything that they had used to come to their decision of lying or truthful. Before viewing each appeal, the participant was told whether they had previously judged the appealer to be lying or truthful, but not whether their judgement had been correct or incorrect. Participants were allowed to ‘pause’ the appeals, and to watch each appeal as often as they felt necessary.

After viewing each appeal, a semi-structured interview schedule was used, to which the interviewer noted the participants’ responses. The participants were first asked the general question ‘What made you decide that this person was lying/telling the truth?’ This question was asked to allow the participants to specify which cues were most relevant for them, and to allow for the possibility of uncovering previously unidentified cues. This general question was followed by probing questions in order to attempt to elicit specific cues that could be subsequently tested. This methodology of allowing the participants to comment freely, followed by probing questions, follows O’Sullivan and Ekman’s research in to cues to deception used by participants accurate at detecting deception (2004).

If the participant did not mention emotion in answer to the first, general question, the interviewer then asked ‘Can you describe the person’s emotions?’ This question was asked because in the specific context of people making appeals for missing or murdered relatives, it was expected that affective responses may be particularly salient. The participant was then asked ‘Was there anything about the

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person’s facial expressions that helped you decide?’ Facial expressions were of interest as the face is one of the primary modes of communicating emotion, and in a study by Porter and ten Brinke (2008), it was found that all participants leaked inconsistent emotional expressions when trying to produce deceptive expressions of emotion. This lends some support to Darwin’s inhibition hypothesis (1872), that some aspects of genuine facial expression cannot be voluntarily simulated, but may be involuntarily expressed when a genuine emotion is felt; and also to Ekman’s (2001) related proposal that during deception, emotional leakage in facial expressions is an involuntary and near-ubiquitous human behaviour. Moreover, a recent study investigating appeals for help with missing or murdered relatives, found that facial expressions related to disgust, distress, surprise and happiness discriminated between honest and deceptive appealers (ten Brinke & Porter, 2012), suggesting that this channel of communication is worthy of further investigation.

The participants were then asked ‘Was there anything about the person’s eyes that helped you decide?’ The interest in whether the participants used information from the eyes as a cue to deception was based on previous findings that in the specific context of appeals, deceptive appealers were perceived to have less direct eye contact than honest appealers (Wright Whelan, 2009). Furthermore, gaze aversion has been associated with deception in a different high stake situation (Vrij & Mann, 2001a), and has been found in a meta-analysis to emerge as a cue to deception when moderated by motivation to succeed in the lie (DePaulo et al., 2003). The participants were then asked ‘Was there anything that the person said that helped you decide?’ This probing question was intended to elicit any specific verbal cues that the participants used. The verbal content of speech has long been regarded by many researchers as being important in differentiating honesty and

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deception (for example, DePaulo et al, 2003; Ekman, 2001; Steller & Kohnken, 1989; Shuy, 1998), as various factors associated with producing deceptive communication may result in cues such as speech disturbances, vagueness, and distancing strategies. Moreover, several studies investigating high stakes deception have found verbal cues to be useful, including evasive or equivocal language (Adams & Jarvis, 2006; Harpster et al., 2009; ten Brinke & Porter, 2012), speech dysfluency and errors (Davis et al., 2005; Vrij & Mann, 2001a), and word and/or phrase repetition (Davis et al., 2005; Harpster et al., 2009; Vrij & Mann, 2001a).

Next, participants were asked ‘Was there anything about the way the person spoke that helped you decide?’ This was intended to prompt any paraverbal cues used, as several studies that have examined high-stakes lies have reported that some paraverbal cues may be associated with deception. These include a higher vocal pitch (Hall, 1986; Wright Whelan, 2009), a lack of vocal modulation (Harpster et al., 2009), a less certain and direct voice (Koper & Sahlman, 1991; Wright Whelan, 2009), and increased pausing or hesitation (Mann et al., 2002; Vrij & Mann, 2001a; Wright Whelan, 2009).

Finally, the participants were asked ‘How did the person make you feel?’ This question was based on the finding that people feel significantly less comfortable when hearing a lie than when hearing a truth (Anderson, DePaulo, Ansfield, Tickle & Green, 1999), and on suggestions from leading researchers (Vrij, 2004; DePaulo & Morris, 2004) that implicit methods may be a promising area for future research in deception detection. It was also designed to investigate whether emotional contagion (Hatfield, Cacioppo & Rapson, 1992) was a factor in the participants’ judgements: it has been shown that viewing photographs of sad faces evokes a corresponding

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affective response in the viewer (Wild, Erb & Bartels, 2001), and it may be that this effect is more likely to occur when viewing faces expressing genuine emotions.

The nine appeals used in the study were presented to the participants in two different randomised orders. There were five honest appeals and four deceptive appeals (as noted previously, one of the deceptive appeals used in the previous study was known to both the participants). The extracts used from the ‘EyesForLies’ blog in this study related to three of the deceptive appeals, and were all made when the appeals were first broadcast and before the outcome of the case was known.