A Behaviour Sequence Analysis of Nonverbal Communication and Deceit in Different Personality Clusters

Abstract

Despite difficulties in interpretation, nonverbal communication is especially important in forensic settings, such as police investigations. Three distinct clusters of personality disorders have been outlined as being associated with criminal behaviour. Understanding the similarities and differences between these personality clusters and nonverbal communication could help investigators look for key signs of psychological distress or deception. The current research proposes a novel approach to nonverbal communication: behaviour sequence analysis (BSA). An application of this approach is outlined to investigate whether criminals with different personality types are better at concealing emotions and nonverbal communication when being interrogated. The results indicate that while sequences are generally similar across clusters, individuals from different personality clusters exhibit unique patterns. This research provides an initial step towards a new area of nonverbal communication research and application, which could be used in future research to highlight increased possibility of deception or concealment of emotion.

Airport artificial intelligence can detect deception: or am i lying?

“…Before we build a complex computer-assisted deception detector, it is important to investigate where this approach begins in the research literature. Micro-expressions are innate involuntary physical responses to emotional stimuli, typically used to indicate a mismatch/disharmony between what is being said by an individual, and what is felt (Marono, Clarke, Navarro, & Keatley, 2018;Marono, Clarke, Navarro, & Keatley, 2017). Microexpressions typically occur as fast as 1/15 to 1/25 of a second, and are therefore imperceptible to the human eye, and cannot accurately be detected in real time; this means that we cannot observe an individual and decipher his or her micro-expressions as they occur (Honts, Hartwig, Kleinman, & Meissner, 2009).…”

To freeze or not to freeze: A culture-sensitive motion capture approach to detecting deceit

“…In this paper, motion capture equipment instead of manual coding was used to measure movement. The rich and objective data that motion capture equipment provides creates opportunities for exploring new research avenues, such as changes in behavior over time [21, 22], clusters of cues [9, 34], and the exploration of new cues [23]. The first results of such studies are promising.…”

“…This top-down research approach can be useful, but the majority of studied cues are unrelated to deceit [8] and it can curtail the detection of novel and lesser-known cues. This is arguably why recent studies using post hoc cue selection have had success in discovering new, unexplored cues [21, 22, 23]. Second, because manual coding is time-consuming, it creates a trade-off between the amount of data collected and the number of coded actions [20].…”

Unmaking a murderer: behaviour sequence analysis of false confessions

“…Sequence analysis has previously been used in a variety of criminal and legal contexts, including: drink driving (Keatley et al, 2017), behavioural deception detection (Marono, Clarke, Navarro, & Keatley, 2017a, 2017b, violent episodes (Taylor, Keatley, & Clarke, 2017), rape cases (Ellis, Clarke, & Keatley, 2017;Fossi, Clarke, & Lawrence, 2005;Lawrence, Fossi, & Clarke, 2010), homicides (Keatley, Yaksic, & Reid, 2017), and courtroom dynamics (Gnisci & Bakeman, 2007). In relation to the present research, to the authors' knowledge, there is no previous research using BSA to analyse legal interrogations.…”