After a while, the made-up story may come to mind more readily than the true one,” she says. “People who know that their fabricated stories may be challenged will sometimes practise telling their false tales. Psychologist Bella DePaulo at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies deception, also found the study “intriguing” but points out that not all lies are more complex than truths, nor do they necessarily require more inhibition. “We don’t know whether they are good liars, all we know is they lie a lot,” she explains. “This is a very interesting study,” says O’Sullivan. Previous studies have shown that people with less grey matter tend to break more rules and care less about moral transgressions, says Raine. Jessica is convinced Joe is living a double life after finding an explicit photo and inappropriate messages in his phone. Grey matter mostly comprises the cell bodies of neurons, which process information. Austistic children, who find it very difficult to lie, develop white matter at a sixth the rate of ordinary children. In order to make this diagnosis, a mental health specialist will need to consider a variety of factors, including whether common characteristics of the condition are present, and how long symptoms of this disorder have been occurring. You also have to suppress anxious emotions and the automatic impulse to tell the truth. Currently, there is no standardised, medically accepted pathological liar test. You have to think, what does she know about the situation, what does she not know’,” he says. Raine believes that having more white matter makes people better at the complex process of lying, which involves manipulation, thinking ahead and multi-tasking. Responsible for information transmission, white matter is composed of nerve fibres or “axons” that connect nerve cells or neurons to each other. Liars also had 14% less grey matter than the controls. They do not lie to avoid responsibilities or penalties, or for some type of gain. Pathological liars do not gain anything from their lies, not in the traditional sense. The lying typically begins in adolescence and continues into adulthood. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), he scanned the brains of all three groups and found that liars had 26% more white matter compared with anti-social, non-liars, and 22% more than the controls. A pathological liar is defined as a person who chronically tells lies for no particular reason. This allowed him to identify 12 as pathological liars, 16 as people with a personality disorder but who did not exhibit pathological lying and 21 as controls, who were neither anti-social, nor liars. Raine interviewed 108 volunteers from five temporary employment agencies in Los Angeles and set them standard psychopathic tests. Until now no one has looked at the structure of the brains of this particular group, says psychologist Maureen O’Sullivan of the University of San Francisco in California, who specialises in lying and truthfulness. “It’s almost like a livelihood,” says Raine. They are looking for ways to use this as an alternative to the polygraph test.īut pathological liars are a distinct group who systematically manipulate others, lie or use aliases for financial gain or personal pleasure, such as to get sickness benefits or to skip work. Other researchers have used brain imaging to show that the prefrontal cortex is more active when ordinary people tell lies.
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