Most dems will need to have a stoke to admit how dishonest Clinton/Gore are!
In detecting liars, actions speak louder than words
By Richard A. Knox, Globe Staff, 5/11/2000
How do you tell when someone is lying? Don't listen to the words. Watch the face.
Researchers report today that people who have suffered brain damage that wipes out their ability to decipher speech are much sharper than almost everybody else at spotting lies.
Not that most people are very good lie detectors. In fact, earlier studies have shown that the vast majority are no better than a coin toss at discriminating truth from falsehood - and that includes police officers, psychiatrists, judges, and customs inspectors.
In contrast, stroke victims who suffer from a disorder called receptive aphasia - the inability to comprehend speech - can detect nearly three lies out of every four.
The reason is that, at least for some kinds of lies, words apparently get in the way of other telling clues to deception. When the brain's left-hemisphere speech comprehension area is damaged, that removes the distraction of words. The researchers believe other parts of the brain gradually sharpen, especially right-hemisphere areas attuned to tiny, fleeting facial expressions that betray true feeling.
''These are negative emotions that are coming through - social smiles interspersed with tiny moments of fear, sadness, or disgust that leak through,'' said Nancy L. Etcoff, a Massachusetts General Hospital psychologist who conducted the study with colleagues in San Francisco and New Jersey. Their results are published in the British journal Nature.
Psychologist Paul Ekman of the University of California at San Francisco, who collaborated on the study, said aphasia patients are better at detecting a certain kind of deception - a lie about what someone is feeling at the moment.
''This doesn't mean you can generally disregard what people say, not if you're trying to discern if someone is being truthful about past action, about what they're planning to do next, or about their beliefs,'' Ekman said. ''In all those cases, you have to be able to not only understand the words but look for clues within the words and clues in the discrepancy between the words and what the face looks like and how the voice sounds.''
Other research, Ekman said, is showing that a small fraction of people are skilled at spotting all kinds of lies. He thinks that's because they take in all the inconsistencies in facial expression, voice, body language, and words.
''Of 5,000 people we've tested, we've found 2 or 3 percent who have this uncanny knack,'' Ekman said. ''There are people who can do it 85 or 90 percent of the time. We're trying to find out how they do it.''
The aphasia study confirms suspicions some have had about the special insights of aphasia patients. In his 1985 book, ''The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,'' neurologist Oliver Sacks recounts a scene in which aphasia patients laughed uproariously as they watched President Reagan deliver a televised speech, even though they couldn't understand his words.
''All the aphasics knew was that Reagan didn't look like someone who was believing what he was saying,'' Ekman said.
To test the hypothesis that aphasia patients had special lie-detecting skills, the researchers recruited 10 stroke patients who could follow simple instructions and asked them to watch videotapes of nurses describing scenes they were watching on tape. If the nurse was telling the truth, the aphasia subjects were told to hold up one finger; if she was lying, hold up two.
The nurses were asked to describe a pleasant scene, whatever they were actually watching. But half the time, they were looking at distressing pictures of burn victims and amputees.
The aphasia patients' responses were compared with those of three other groups on the same test - 10 patients with right-sided brain damage that conceivably could have dulled their ability to read facial and voice clues; 10 healthy adults similar in age and sex to the aphasics; and 48 healthy MIT undergraduates.
The 68 non-aphasia patients did no better than 50-50 in detecting which nurses were lying. But as a group, the aphasia subjects detected lies six times out of 10, relying on facial cues and vocal cues together. The lie-detection rate went up to 73 percent when aphasia patients relied on facial expression only, indicating these visual cues are paramount.
One of the 10 aphasia patients proved no better than the non-aphasia subjects at detecting lies. But significantly, that patient was the only one whose stroke had occurred less than a year earlier. Etcoff said this suggests it takes time for aphasia patients to develop enhanced lie-detection skills.
''This study is so interesting,'' said Jerome Kaplan, a Cambridge speech pathologist who works with aphasia patients. ''It provides evidence that these folks are able to pick up more subtle changes in vocal expression, quivers, maybe a little more sheen on a person's face. They often have an enhanced perception of emotion in others.''
This story ran on page A14 of the Boston Globe on 5/11/2000.
¸ Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.
boston.com |
