Individual Differences in the Physiological Detection of Deception

Abstract

The research programme reported here was concerned with the relationship between individual differences in electrodermal activity and the ability to detect deception from measures of differential responsiveness within the electrodermal system. A review of the literature indicated that three dimensions of electrodermal activity might exist and be of relevance to detectability: absolute reactivity of the electrodermal system, relative reactivity or specificity of the system in relation to other response systems, and the degree of change within the system or its lability. The programme therefore involved the measurement of these three aspects, the study of their dimensionality, the development of indices of detectability, and the study of the predictive power of the dimensions in relation to detectability. The relationship of these several measures to scores on self report tests of personality (the superfactors of extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism, and a measure of socialization) was also pursued. The measures of electrodermal activity were derived from recordings in four stimulus situations: relaxing without task demands, listening to tones presented at brief intervals, performing mental arithmetic, and listening to a count-up during which an aversive stimulus, a white noise burst, was expected. ... On the basis of the research programme and the literature review it is concluded that attentional factors reflected in electrodermal lability underlie individual differences in detectability using electrodermal measures in typical laboratory tests of deception. In particular, subjects who maintain orienting responses to stimuli because they attribute significance to these events are more likely to be detected using electrodermal measures. Individual differences in systemic reactivity are far less important. Before further work is conducted on the question of individual differences in detectability, however, the issue of the reliability of these measures should be systematically addressed.