Um … they were wearing …: The effect of deception on specific hand gestures

Abstract

Purpose. Non-verbal communication researchers have identified specific categories of hand gestures but deception researchers typically ignore these. This experiment refined and developed some of these categories and examined whether there is a difference in the frequency of speech prompting and rhythmic pulsing gestures between liars and truth tellers. Methods.Twenty truth tellers and 20 liars (all undergraduate students) described a person who entered a room where they were playing a game with a confederate. Truth tellers gave a truthful description of an event they had participated in. Liars had previously taken money from a wallet in the room but had not played a game with the confederate, or seen anybody enter the room, they just pretended they did during their interview.Results. Truth tellers made more rhythmic pulsing gestures than liars indicating this type of gesture may be connected with the prosodic flow of speech. Liars made significantly more speech prompting gestures than truth tellers, supporting the notion that greater cognitive load may be experienced during deceptive accounts. Conclusions. This study demonstrates the benefit of examining subcategories of gestures when investigating deceptive behaviour.This study examines whether liars and truth tellers differ in some specific types of speech-related hand gestures. Non-verbal communication researchers (Argentin, 1985;Efron, 1941;Ekman & Friesen, 1972;McNeill, 1992) have identified many subcategories of hand gestures and Bull (2009) points out that deception research would benefit from a more detailed examination of gesture in relation to speech content. Deception researchers typically ignore these subcategories. As we will argue in this article, different subcategories of hand gestures may be related to deception. The first to show this were Caso, Maricchiolo, Bonaiuto, Vrij, and Mann (2006). In the present article, we continue their innovative approach and examine two subcategories never investigated before in deception research: speech prompting and rhythmic pulsing.

Verbal and Nonverbal Clues for Real-life Deception Detection

“…Caso et al (Caso et al, 2006) identified particular hand gestures that can be related to the act of deception using data from simulated interviews. Cohen et al (2010) found that fewer iconic hand gestures were a sign of a deceptive narration, and Hillman et al (2012) determined that increased speech prompting gestures were associated with deception while increased rhythmic pulsing gestures were associated with truthful behavior. Also related is the taxonomy of hand gestures developed by (Maricchiolo et al, ) for deception and social behavior.…”

A Comprehensive Review on Features Extraction and Features Matching Techniques for Deception Detection

“…[34] used head movement analysis to study how it could be used to detect deception. As well as psychological and physiological evaluations on human perception [2], [13], [17]- [20] and studies on other facial, linguistic, gestural, thermal, and biometric indications. Table 1 shows the non-verbal deception detection research work previously published along with the databases used in some studies.…”

Comparing a Perceptual and an Automated Vision-Based Method for Lie Detection in Younger Children

“…Although, these distinctions are presented in the upper face, this study failed to find a significant difference in the total amount of movement between a deceptive and truthful condition. Moreover, when considering hand movements, another study found that lie-tellers have the tendency to do more speech prompting gestures, while truth-tellers do more rhythmic pulsing gestures (Hillman et al, 2012). …”

“…In the future, such methods could be combined with what has been achieved via automated analysis of verbal cues (Benus et al, 2006) and gestures (Hillman et al, 2012) as potential sources for lie detection, since combining verbal and non-verbal cues have proven to be more accurate for lie detection (Vrij et al, 2004). Moreover, the inconsistency regarding the relevance and value of bodily cues for deception may partly be due to the use of different detection methods.…”