Abstract
This study explored some of the psychological determinants of electrodermal responses to deception. There were four groups of 24 subjects, consisting of normal males and females, and personality disordered males and females. The deceptive paradigms used consisted of three guilty knowledge card tasks that differed in the nature of the stimuli used and in procedural instructions. There was also a general question task involving five neutral questions and two emotive/moral questions. After each task a number of self-report analogue scales were administered in order to record the subjects reactions to each task and the type of countermeasure they had used. The subjects also completed the EPI, the Gough Socialisation scale, the Arrow-Dot test, and the Mosher Guilt Inventory. The hypotheses formulated were based on previous empirical findings and theories relevant to the detection of deception. Detectability on card tasks was found to relate to the following: procedural instruction, countermeasure strategies, involvement in the task, the extent to which the critical items are processed into memory, and lack of confidence in ones ability to beat the machine. The findings give support for the arousal and conflict theories of deception detectability. Anxiety did not impair detectability unless it was related to the extent to which subjects found the questions disturbing, which may be independent of veracity or menda-city. A particular question may elicit a disturbance for a number of reasons related to previous conditioning, guilt, embarrassment, and ambivalence over how to answer the question.