Behavioral detection of emotional, high-stakes deception: Replication in a registered report

We replicated research by ten Brinke and Porter (2012), who reported that a combination of four behavioral cues (word count, tentative words, upper face surprise, lower face happiness) could accurately discriminate deceptive murderers from genuinely distressed individuals, pleading for the return of a missing relative.

We hypothesized that each of the four behavioral cues identified in the original study would be similarly related (i.e., size, direction, significance) to veracity in a novel set of pleaders. With these cues as predictors, we also hypothesized that logistic regression models-separately testing the original and replication samples-would produce similar accuracy rates exceeding chance in discriminating genuine from deceptive pleaders.

We gathered a new sample of public appeals, including 82 genuine and 14 deceptive pleaders. After establishing ground truth, we transcribed video-recorded pleas and coded them for the presence of upper face surprise and lower face happiness. We used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to determine word count and the proportion of tentative words in each appeal.

We found support for several hypotheses. Tentative words were used significantly more by deceptive (vs. genuine) pleaders in both the original and replication samples. Deceptive pleaders used significantly fewer words in both samples, although this relationship was significant only in the original sample. Liars in both samples smiled more than truth-tellers, although this relationship was statistically significant only in the replication sample. However, predictive accuracy was poor and did not differ from chance in the replication sample.

Findings do not provide a tidy picture of the reliability of behavioral cues to deception. Although some behavioral cues did replicate across samples, others did not. More research will be necessary to understand the factors that produce variable findings across samples, despite using the same methods of investigation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).