Effects of Guilt, Disbelief, and Assessed Lie-Truth Telling Abilities on Physiological Responses in the Guilty Action Test

Abstract

present ERP study, we aimed to test this issue. For this purpose, we constructed 320 French sentences including 120 sentences with positive valence, 120 with negative valence and 120 with a neutral valence. In half of the sentences, the referent designated by the agent and/or the patient of the event that causes a particular emotional state were referentially related to the speaker (a) « C'est avec cet objet que le crâne de mon père a été fracassé. », It is with this object that the skull of my father was shattered), while in the other half not (b) « C'est avec cet objet que le crâne d'un homme a été fracassé. », It is with this object that the skull of a man was shattered). We hypothesized that if the theory of mind is activated, then the empathy of the individual perceiving the emotion should be larger in a), this should be reflected by an enhancement of the LPP. Moreover, emotional regulation should be more difficult. Preliminary data with 10 native speakers of French showed that the LPP was larger for emotional sentences in comparison with neutral ones. Moreover, and more importantly, our data supported the prediction that linguistic material creating a particular emotional state because of referential proximity was able to modulate the LPP amplitude. Taken together, the present findings suggest that linguistic structures may constraint differently emotional states. Further investi-gation on this issue should be conducted in order to clarify the neurocognitive architecture of emotion processing. The Concealed Information Test (CIT) is a psychophysiological memory detection method used in criminal interrogations to uncover information that the suspect tries to hide. In the CIT, examinees are presented with several sets of items. In each set, one item is relevant to the interrogated crime, whereas the other items serve as controls. Based on the assumption that only a guilty person knows the details of the crime, enhanced responsivity to critical items indicates recognition and may imply involvement. The innocent suspect, for whom all items are neutral, is expected to respond much less to the critical items. In the context of the CIT, the present experiment used a mock crime procedure in which 100 participants were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions in a 2 × 2 factorial design. Two guilt conditions (guilty and informed innocents) were crossed with two human interrogation feedback conditions (believed and not believed). The Guilty Action polygraph Test (GAT -a version of the CIT) was administered several days after the mock crime and the human interrogation. Along with the common dependent polygraph measures (electrodermal, respiration, and cardiovascular measures), self-assessments of the ability to tell lies and to tell the truths convincingly, were gathered. Results showed enhanced responses to the critical items for all three physiological measures. Respiration responses significantly differentiated between guilty and informed innocent participants. No significant guilt effect was obtained for electrodermal and cardiovascular responses. The feedback manipulation failed to affect all three physiological responses. Informed innocent participants who rated low their ability to tell the truth convincingly elicited larger relative electrodermal responses to critical items than high truth-telling raters. Guilty participants who rated high their lie telling ability exhibited larger relative electrodermal responses to critical items than low raters. Further research on the association between self-assessment of lie and truth telling abilities and physiological responsivity in the Guilty Action Test is recommended.