Emotional dishonesty often occurs without telling a lie. Instead, it's lying by omission. People withhold feelings: They hide their anger, fear and hurt. They don't express their wishes and desires. On the surface, lies by omission tend to appear harmless.
The three emotions most frequently experienced by people when they are lying are fear, guilt, and somewhat surprisingly, delight.
Examples of Emotional Reasoning
Signs of emotional reasoning include thoughts like “I feel guilty, so I must have done something bad,” “I'm feeling inadequate, so I must be worthless,” or “I feel afraid, so I must be in a dangerous situation.”
Our feelings are important—we need to listen to them, to become intimately familiar with them, to learn their depths. But that doesn't mean they're always honest with us. Sometimes, our feelings lie. Anxiety is a sincere and good feeling when you hear footsteps behind you in a dark parking garage.
Sweating or dryness: Autonomic nervous system changes can trigger liars to sweat in the T-area of the face (upper lip, forehead, chin and around the mouth) or have dryness in the mouth and eyes — the person might excessively blink or squint, lick or bite their lips or swallow hard, according to Glass.
Polygraph tests- so-called "lie detectors"--are typically based on detecting autonomic reactions and are considered unreliable (see "The polygraph in doubt"). That's why psychologists have been cataloging clues to deception--such as facial expressions, body language and linguistics--to help hook the dishonest.
Psychologists call the practice “surface acting”. “Surface acting refers to the type of emotional communication that involves covering up your true feelings while you put on a false front,” writes Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph. D for Psychology Today.
Your emotional truth is what you feel about a situation, and sometimes it has nothing to do with actual facts. Two people can go through the same experience and have two entirely different perspectives. Feelings are real, but they cannot be categorized as fact or truth.
One of the most common thinking traps we fall into is emotional reasoning: taking our emotions as evidence for the truth. When you use emotional reasoning, whatever you're feeling at the time is believed to be true automatically and unconditionally, regardless of the evidence.
Emotional experiences have three components: a subjective experience, a physiological response and a behavioral or expressive response.
2000), emotional deception involves the intentional misrepresentation of emotion (e.g., Barry 1999; Barry and Rehel 2014; Fulmer et al. 2009). We focus on self-interested deception in the context of negotiations.
The three most commonly referred to are lies of commission, lies of omission, and lies of influence, aka character lies. The reading below neatly summarizes these and provides some examples.
According to our results, it seems that, for both regions of the face, anger is one of the easiest emotions to identify, while surprise is among the most difficult to recognize.
Shame is possibly the most difficult emotion we feel, and hard to manage. Sometimes we cover it up by pleasing others, or by trying to be perfect. Sometimes we pull back and spend more time alone. Sometimes we just feel numb.
Stoic is a term for someone who can handle pain and hardship without showing one's feelings or complaining.
People often hide emotions to protect their relationships. When someone you care about does something upsetting, you might choose to hide your annoyance. Yes, their actions bothered you. But if they react negatively when you tell them how you feel, you could end up triggering an even more painful conflict.
Pathological lying is a symptom of various personality disorders, including antisocial, narcissistic, and histrionic personality disorders. Other conditions, such as borderline personality disorder, may also lead to frequent lies, but the lies themselves are not considered pathological.
According to the WSJ, many doctors look for signs of lying, such as avoiding eye contact, frequent pauses in the converstion, unusual voice inflections and other signs of anxiety.
Study the eyes
Researchers say no. Science shows that liars do not avoid eye contact any more frequently than those telling the truth. The key thing to look for in eye movement is deviation from their baseline.