INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES AND CHANGES IN NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR - UNMASKING THE CHANGING FACES OF DECEPTION

Investigations of deceptive communication have examined a number of no nverbal behaviors as potential correlates of deception, however, revie ws of this literature reveal only a handful of behaviors that consiste ntly distinguish deceptive messages from truthful ones. Procedural lim itations apparent in some of these studies and an underspecification o f individual and discursive factors that affect the production of nonv erbal behavior were offered as potential explanations for these findin gs. The present study sought to reduce the procedural limitations of s ome prior studies and employed time series analysis to model individua l and discursive influences on the response latencies of deceivers and truthtellers. A decay impulse model provided a good description of th e data. This model reflects a decaying series of momentary increases ( spikes) in the response latency series that were associated with an in terviewer's critical questions, and the size of these spikes decreased with each successive critical question. Message veracity and self-mon itoring were two variables that combined to affect the fit of the deca y impulse model. Implications of these findings are discussed along wi th suggestions for future research.