Affective Priming Caused by Lying

Typically, arousal increases when telling a lie, as indicated in psychophysiological studies about lie detection. But the emotional valence induced by lying is unknown, though intuition indicates that it may be negative. Indeed, the Electrodermal Activity (EDA), used in such studies, only shows arousal changes during an emotional response. In this study, we examined the emotional valence induced by lying using two tasks. First, in the deceptive task, participants answered “no” to every question regarding the nature of displayed playing cards. Therefore, they told a lie about specific cards. During the task, their EDA was recorded. Secondly, in the figure estimation task, they assessed pictures by “like” or “dislike” after looking at playing cards visibly or subliminally as prime stimuli. We expected them to tend to estimate figures by “dislike” when cards relevant to deception were previously shown. This would mean that an affective priming effect due to telling a lie happened. Actually, this effect was found only when prime stimuli were displayed visibly. This result suggests that lying per se induces negative emotions even without motivation or punishment due to lying. Furthermore, we found that such effect was more blatant in participants whose EDA changes were salient while lying.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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