Psychopathy and Detection of Deception In a Prison Population

Abstract

The effectiveness of detection of deception was evaluated with a sample of 48 prisoners, half of whom were diagnosed psychopaths. Half of each group were “guilty” of taking $20 in a mock crime and half were “innocent.” An examiner who had no knowledge of the guilt or innocence of each subject conducted a field‐type interview followed by a control question polygraph examination. Electrodermal, respiration, and cardiovascular activity was recorded, and field (semi‐objective) and quantitative evaluations of the physiological responses were made. Field evaluations by the examiner produced 88% correct, 4% wrong, and 8% inconclusives. Excluding inconclusives, there were 96% correct decisions. Using blind quantitative scoring and field evaluations, significant discrimination between “guilty” and “innocent” subjects was obtained for a variety of electrodermal, respiration, and cardiovascular measures. Psychopaths were as easily detected as nonpsychopaths, and psychopaths showed evidence of stronger electrodermal responses and heart rate decelerations. The effectiveness of control question techniques in differentiating truth and deception was demonstrated in psychopathic and nonpsychopathic criminals in a mock crime situation, and the generalizability of the results to the field situation is discussed.

Psychopathy and structure of primary mental abilities

“…Group M was made up of 15 inmates with ratings (7-11) between those of the extreme groups. The distribution of ratings and the degree of separation between groups are similar to those involved in several recent studies (e.g., Hare, 1979;Raskin & Hare, 1978).…”

Electrodermal and phasic heart rate responses in the Guilty Actions Test: Comparing guilty examinees to informed and uninformed innocents

“…However, only after the presentation of relevant items to guilty subjects, the phasic HR showed a marked deceleration, that peaked around 8 s after stimulus onset. The initial acceleration was interpreted as a correlate of the subject's verbal denial whereas the deceleration that most clearly distinguished between both experimental groups was thought to be related to attentional processes (see also Raskin and Hare, 1978). As the participants were requested to immediately deny each GKT question, both above mentioned processes were confounded in this study to an unknown degree.…”

Psychophysiological detection of deception and Preliminary Process Theory: A comment on Palmatier and Rovner (2015)

“…Verschuere et al (2009) suggest that the initial increase in heart rate may be associated with the subject's preparation to make a verbal response to the test question. The subsequent deceleration has been associated with orienting (Verschuere et al), sensory intake (Raskin and Hare, 1978), or a baroreflex response to an increase in arterial blood pressure (Raskin, 1979).…”