Psychophysiology of deception: Forensic applications

When we lie our brain arousal level is increased by the Autonomic Nervous System, which is also responsible for other body changes that can be easily detected in legal contests (by a lie detector). The problem with these physiological indexes is that they reflect an emotional perturbation, not the cognitive act of lying itself, therefore they cannot be always reliably used. Some recent electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies tried to investigate neural correlates underlying deception, accounting for the complexity of such a function, through the spatiotemporal analysis of neural activation while performing a task involving deception. Granting the insights given on neural activity associated with deceptive behavior, little attention has been paid so far to the effects on brain activity when lying involves affective information. The aim of this presentation is to sum up the more recent developments of psychophysiology in the detection of deception in its forensic applications and show the results of our ERP study (Proverbio et al., 2013) on untruthful behaviors answering to visually presented neutral and affective questions.