Crocodile Tears: Humans Show Greater Range Of Emotions And Speech Hesitation During Fake Remorse
Christopher Philip
Those who were genuinely remorseful did not often swing from positive to negative without going through a neutral expression first.
Apparently it’s not so easy to fake remorse – at least if you know what to look for according to a study published in the journal Law and Human Behavior. In the first investigation of the nature of true and false remorse, researchers Leanne Brinke and colleagues, from the Centre for the Advancement of Psychology and Law, University of British Columbia and Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada, showed that when remorse was faked targets tended to have a greater range of expression, swinging widely from one emotion to another termed “emotional turbulence,” as well as an increase in speech hesitation.
The findings have a widespread application in law enforcement, judges and parole board members who seek to decode genuine remorse from feigned remorse. It is particularly useful during sentencing and parole hearings as the outcome is significant and reaching. Deception is well known to occur and be influential in the court system and often influences the outcome as human emotion plays a certain role in judging others.
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The study observed facial, verbal and body language behaviours of 31 subjects in real personal wrongdoings with either genuine or fabricated remorse. The subjects were recorded telling the experimenter about a true non-criminal event in their life that made them feel intensely and genuinely remorseful in as much detail as possible. Next, they were asked to retell another true event in their life that they felt little to no remorse. Except in this condition, the subjects were asked to feign remorse as they told their story.
Nearly 300,000 frames were analyzed for facial expressions, body language and speech patterns. Amongst the body language cues examined included use of illustrators or hand gestures, eye aversion, blink rate and self manipulators (touching the face, neck, etc.). On the verbal spectrum, they were coded for speech hesitation (use of “um”, “uh), proportion of self-references (use of “I”, “we”, “my”) and references to others (use of “him”, “she”, “they”).
The results showed that participants displaying false remorse exhibited more of the seven universal emotions including happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise, and contempt than those where were genuinely sorry. By coupling the emotions into related categories of positive (happiness), negative (sadness, fear, anger, contempt, disgust) and neutral (neutral, surprise) the researchers found that participants who feigned remorse were more likely to swing widely from a positive emotion to a negative one without displaying a neutral expression in between. In contrast, those who were genuinely remorseful did not often swing from positive to negative without going through a neutral expression first.
During fabricated remorse, students had a significantly greater rate of speech hesitation. The study did not find significant differences in body language and postures between the two conditions. This has been supported by previous research on lie detection.
According to the researchers “Our study is the first to investigate genuine and falsified remorse for behavioral cues that might be indicative of such deception. Identifying reliable cues could have considerable practical implications — for example for forensic psychologists, parole officers and legal decision-makers who need to assess the truthfulness of remorseful displays.”
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Resources
Leanne Brinke, Sarah MacDonald, Stephen Porter, Brian O’Connor. Crocodile Tears: Facial, Verbal and Body Language Behaviours Associated with Genuine and Fabricated Remorse. Law and Human Behavior, 2019; 36(1): 51-59.
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