Emotional Consequence of Telling a Lie

Abstract

Generally, arousal increases when telling a lie, as indicated in psychophysiological studies about lie detection. But the emotional valence induced by lying is unknown, though intuition indicates that it may be negative. Indeed, the EDA (electrodermal activity), used in such studies, only shows arousal changes during an emotional response. In this study, we used two tasks in order to examine the emotional valence induced by lying. At the beginning, in the deceptive task, participants answered "no" to every question regarding the nature of displayed playing cards. Therefore, they told a lie about specific cards. Their EDA was recorded all along the task. Secondly, in the figure estimation task, they assessed pictures positively or negatively after looking at playing cards visibly or subliminally as prime stimuli. We expected them to tend to estimate figures negatively when cards relevant to deception had been previously shown. This would mean that an affective priming effect due to telling a lie actually occurred. All in all, this effect was found only when prime stimuli had been displayed visibly. This result suggests that lying per se induces negative emotions even without motivation or punishment due to lying. Furthermore, we found that such effect was all the more obvious in participants whose EDA changes were salient while lying.