Individual Differences and Changes in Nonverbal Behavior

Abstract

Investigations of deceptive communication have examined a number of nonverbal behaviors as potential correlates of deception; however, reviews of this literature reveal only a handful of behaviors that consistently distinguish deceptive messages from truthful ones. Procedural limitations apparent in some of these studies and an underspecification of individual and discursive factors that affect the production of nonverbal behavior were offered as potential explanations for these findings. The present study sought to reduce the procedural limitations of some prior studies and employed time series analysis to model individual and discursive influences on the response latencies of deceivers and truthtellers. A decay impulse model provided a good description of the data. This model reflects a decaying series of momentary increases (spikes) in the response latency series that were associated with an interviewer's critical questions, and the size of these spikes decreased with each successive critical question. Message veracity and self-monitoring were two variables that combined to affect the fit of the decay impulse model. Implications of these findings are discussed along with suggestions for future research.