Emotional Intelligence and Mismatching Expressive and Verbal Messages: A Contribution to Detection of Deception

Abstract

Processing facial emotion, especially mismatches between facial and verbal messages, is believed to be important in the detection of deception. For example, emotional leakage may accompany lying. Individuals with superior emotion perception abilities may then be more adept in detecting deception by identifying mismatch between facial and verbal messages. Two personal factors that may predict such abilities are female gender and high emotional intelligence (EI). However, evidence on the role of gender and EI in detection of deception is mixed. A key issue is that the facial processing skills required to detect deception may not be the same as those required to identify facial emotion. To test this possibility, we developed a novel facial processing task, the FDT (Face Decoding Test) that requires detection of inconsistencies between facial and verbal cues to emotion. We hypothesized that gender and ability EI would be related to performance when cues were inconsistent. We also hypothesized that gender effects would be mediated by EI, because women tend to score as more emotionally intelligent on ability tests. Data were collected from 210 participants. Analyses of the FDT suggested that EI was correlated with superior face decoding in all conditions. We also confirmed the expected gender difference, the superiority of high EI individuals, and the mediation hypothesis. Also, EI was more strongly associated with facial decoding performance in women than in men, implying there may be gender differences in strategies for processing affective cues. It is concluded that integration of emotional and cognitive cues may be a core attribute of EI that contributes to the detection of deception.

Deceit and facial expression in children: the enabling role of the “poker face” child and the dependent personality of the detector

“…No statistical differences were found here, only a trend for women to a better discrimination when judging a true statement and, interestingly, in the more difficult condition (neutral expression). This finding resembles the data of Wojciechowski et al (2014) about the superiority of women in the performance of a deception task with inconsistencies between the facial and verbal cues. It would be of worth for future studies to perform more experiments with larger samples to check if women can be better lie detectors than men in a variety of harder circumstances (for instance, in total absence of facial emotional cues).…”

The Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Cool and Hot Cognitive Processes: A Systematic Review

“…DeBusk and Austin ( 2011 ), on the other hand, using the TEMINT, found that TEMINT was not a significant predictor of performance in the emotional IT task. In addition, Wojciechowski et al ( 2014 ) attempted to assess the emotional information processing of inconsistent signals through a facial-verbal decoding task (FDT). In these tasks, participants had to indicate if individuals who demonstrated a specific facial expression on the computer could have truthfully said particular sentences; participants were presented with congruent and incongruent trials.…”

“…Although the results related to performance tests and hot cognitive tasks are promising, it is important to note a few limitations of the present study. First, some of the cognitive tasks may have methodological problems from being newly designed instruments whose reliability has not yet been probed; one example is the FDT (Wojciechowski et al, 2014 ). Second, we observed an enormous variety of instruments that were employed for measuring different aspects of cognition; specifically, 11 different hot cognitive tasks were related with EI performance tests.…”

Emotion recognition and deception detection

“…Empathy is considered necessary for social communication, predicting behavior, and the accurate identification of emotional cues (Keysers, 2012). Specifically, empathy relates to the accurate recognition of facial expressions (Besel & Yuille, 2010), even subliminally presented (Prochnow et al, 2013), and can aid the detection of mismatched emotions (Wojciechowski, Stolarski, & Matthews, 2014); all aspects underlying the EBA.…”