The Role of Emotions in Detecting Deception Mircea Zloteanu Abstract The ability to recognise the emotional states of others is believed to facilitate the detection of deception, but the exact way in which individuals use emotional information during deception detection has not been fully explored. In this paper, the current way of thinking about deception detection is reviewed and extended by a discussion about the importance of the stakes to the liar in emotion cue production. For the perception of emotion cues, individual differences in empathic ability are proposed to be a crucial moderator of the relationship between emotion recognition and deception detection. This ability may facilitate deception detection under certain circumstances but may hinder accuracy in others. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the way emotions relate to both the process of deception and its detection, and propose possible future avenues of research in this area. Key Words: Deception Detection, Empathy, Emotion Recognition, Micro- expressions, Subtle expressions, Stakes, Accuracy. ***** 1. Deception Detection Deception is defined as the act of deliberately instilling a false belief in another individual. 1 It is prevalent in daily communication and a necessary component of social interactions. 2 Although people are aware that lying is common, they often seem unable to accurately detect this behaviour in others. Research on deception has found that individuals are fairly poor at detecting instances when others are lying to them and results suggest that people are only slightly better than chance 3 and are biased towards believing others are being truthful more often than not, regardless of actual veracity. 4 Deception detection does not seem to be influenced by age, gender, experience or even training. 5 An explanation for the poor detection rates observed is the absence of a single, definitive cue of deception. This makes it very difficult to uncover deception in face-to-face interactions. However, research on deception has found that reliable cues do exist (e.g. higher pitch, less arm movement, nervousness), but these vary depending on the situation and the type of lie told. 6 Deception researchers have focused their attention on the emotions experienced by the liar during the act of deceiving as a potential source for the production of behavioural cues. The concept of ‘leakage’ claims that in the process of deceiving others, individuals will ‘leak’ nonverbal information, produced as a result of the strong emotions experienced by the liar, which can then betray the lie.