Abstract

Nonverbally-expressed emotions are not always linked to people’s true emotions. We investigated whether observers’ ability to distinguish trues from lies differs for positive and negative emotional expressions. Participants judged targets either simulating or truly experiencing positive or negative emotions. Deception detection was measured by participants’ inference of the targets’ emotions and their direct judgments of deception. Results of the direct measure showed that participants could not accurately distinguish between truth tellers and liars, regardless which emotion was expressed. As anticipated, the effects emerged on the indirect emotion measure: participants distinguished liars from truth tellers when inferring experienced emotions from negative emotional expressions, but not positive emotional expressions.

摘要

非言语表达的情感并不总是与人们的真实情感相关联。我们调查了观察者区分真实与谎言的能力在正面和负面情感表达上是否有所不同。参与者判断目标是模拟还是真正体验到积极或消极的情绪。欺骗检测是通过参与者对目标情绪的推断及其对欺骗的直接判断来衡量的。直接测量的结果表明，无论表达哪种情感，参与者都无法准确区分真相讲述者和说谎者。正如预期的那样，间接情感测度上出现了这种影响：当从消极的情感表达而非积极的情感表达中推断经历的情感时，参与者将说谎者与真相讲述者区分开。