Lie To Me

Background

Relevant Parts of the Brain

Anterior Cingulate Cortex:

• Connected with the prefrontal and parietal cortex
• Regulates autonomic function including blood pressure and heart rate
• Also involved in rational cognitive functions such as reward-anticipation, decision making, empathy and emotion

Dorsal Lateral Prefrontal Cortex:

• Responsible for motor planning, organization and regulation
• Associated with Working-memory; the storage and manipulation of information

The Parietal Cortex:

• Determination of spatial sense and navigation

The Polygraph

• Inadmissible in court
• Federal Polygraph Handbook:
  
• Question Form - Be clear and concise; Avoid legal terms when possible; Be constructed so that they may be answered yes or no; Not be worded in the form of an accusation or contain an inference that presupposes knowledge or guilt; In specific issue tests when testing for multiple items or amounts of money, use the phrase, "any of', e.g., "Did you steal any of that money?"; In specific issue tests, only address one issue in each question; In specific issue tests, only address one incident in each series.

• Question Type - Primary Relevant. This question tests the possible direct involvement of the examinee. In PDD screening questioning formats, all relevant questions are considered primary relevant questions;
  
• Secondary Relevant. This question tests the examinee's possible involvement in the
  offense under investigation. A secondary relevant question should be constructed to address a secondary issue such as help, plan, or participate; test for secondary involvement in, such as seeing, hearing, or knowing; or focus on the nature or location of evidence and/or physical acts that support the primary offense. There are three types of secondary relevant questions:
• 1. Evidence-Connecting. An evidence-connecting question is designed to
  determine if the examinee was involved with any of the evidence of the crime or is aware of the nature or location of various items of evidence.
  
  Do you know where any of that money is now?
• 2. Guilty-Knowledge. A guilty-knowledge relevant question is used to determine
  if the examinee has any knowledge of who committed the incident under investigation.

Do you know who stole any of that money?

• 3. Secondary-Involvement. A secondary-involvement relevant question tests for
  secondary involvement such as seeing or hearing or focuses on physical acts that support the primary offense.

Did you participate in the theft of any of that money?

• Comparison Question. Physiological responses of comparison questions are
  compared to physiological responses of relevant questions. The comparison question is designed to produce a greater physiological response for the non-deceptive person. The probable lie and directed lie questions are the two types of comparison questions used within the Federal Government.
• 1. Probable-Lie Comparison Question. This question is designed to be a probable lie
  for the examinee. The PLC question should be similar in nature but unrelated by time, place or category to the specific issue. However, in screening examinations the PLC can be related to the issue(s) as long as the screening comparison question establishes a dichotomy between the relevant and comparison issues. A comparison question should be broad in scope and time so that it captures as many of the examinee's past life experiences as possible. The physiological responses to the PLC are compared to the responses of the designated relevant questions. The exclusionary and screening comparison questions are the two types of PLC questions used within the federal government.

Theft issue: Before 1997, did you ever steal anything?

• 2. Exclusionary Comparison Question (ECQ). A probable-lie question
  should be similar in nature but unrelated to the issue being tested. The question should be
  separated from the relevant issue by time, place or category. The comparison question should use the same action verb or similar in nature action verb as that of the relevant issue. A comparison question should be broad in scope and time so that it captures as many of the examinee's past life experiences as possible.

Before this year, did you ever steal anything from someone who trusted you?

• Directed-Lie Comparison. The DLC question is a specialized comparison
  question. A properly constructed DLC question involves a minor transgression which should have some personal significance to the examinee. Upon acknowledging having committed such a transgression, the examinee is directed to lie when asked that question on the test. The question is separated from the relevant issue by category.

Did you ever commit a minor traffic violation?

• Sacrifice Relevant Question. When used, this is the first question that refers to the
  relevant issue, and it prepares the examinee for the introduction of the relevant questions.
  Sacrifice relevant questions are not scored during the test data analysis phase of a PDD
  examination.

Regarding the theft of that car, do you intend to answer each question truthfully?

• Symptomatic Question. This question is designed to test for an outside issue that
  could be more significant for an examinee than the relevant and comparison issues. Symptomatic question responses are evaluated, though not numerically scored, during the test data analysis phase of a PDD examination.

Is there something else you are afraid I will ask you a question about?

• Stimulus Questions: designed to measure capacity for response. These can be relevant or irrelevant:

Does 10+ 9= 19?
Were you on that bridge that night?

• What do the question formats mean?
• The yes/no format means the linguistic construction is always in the hand of the examiner, not the examinee.
• The built in shifts from relevant to irrelevant to comparison and control questions indicate an acknowledgment of the difficulty of maintaining accuracy and control in the testing environment.
  

• Problems with the Polygraph:
  
• For instance, using the Directed-Lie Comparison question as an example of how the subject lies poses several real problems since Polygraph measures physiological response and not neurological response. The form of a directed lie question dictates that the subject is instructed to lie. The point of polygraph is to discern a lie based on a spike in stress levels resulting from the concealment of a lie. The Comparison question removes the element of concealment and therefore removes exactly what the examiner wishes to observe: the effects of concealment.
• The problems with Polygraph tests are well known to most people today, they measure stress without having a way of differentiating between the stress caused by crafting a lie and the stress caused by being subjected to a polygraph.
• Langleben: "Its specificity is limited because it relies on the correlates of peripheral nervous system activity, while deception in a cognition event with top-down control by the central nervous system"
• This is the shift his research is trying to make: from physiology to cognition.
  

The Next Generation of Lie Detection

The Experiment
Subjects: 23 right-handed male undergraduate students (mean age: 19.36)
Task: A modification of the Guilty Knowledge Task (GKT)

• Instruction Protocol:
• Participants were given an envelope with two playing cards, a 5 of clubs and a 7 of spades, along with $20.
• The investigator instructed the participants to deny possession of one of the cards and acknowledge possession of the other during the imaging phase.
• Participants were told they could keep the money only if they successfully concealed the identity of the lie card during the scan session.
• A third party then led them to the scanner and instructed them to answer each question as truthfully as possible.
  

• A sequence of photographed playing cards was presented
• The series of cards included five stimulus classes:
• 1. Lie (5 of clubs or 7 of spades)
• 2. Truth (5 of clubs or 7 of spades)
• 3. Recurrent distracter (2 of hearts)
• 4. Variant distracter (remaining cards, 2- 10 all suits)
• 5. Null (back of card)
• Cards were presented for 2 seconds followed by a variable (0 -16 s) during which the null card was shown.
• 24 Lie, Truth and recurrent distracter cards and 168 variant distracter cards were shown.
• Participants were instructed to press a left button (yes) to confirm that a card was in their possession or the right button (no) to deny it.
• In total, 432 stimuli were presented with a session length of 14.4 minutes.

The experiment still operates with yes/no responses, like the polygraph.

• Results:
  
• 
• 

• 
• No difference between those who reported using a strategy and those who reported using no strategy.
  
• "The key point is that you need to exercise a system that is in charge of regulating and controlling your behavior when you lie more than when you just say the truth," Langleben said. "Three areas of the brain generally become more active during deception: the anterior cingulated cortex, the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex."
• 

"Complications arise when we examine Langleben group’s attempts at replication when using this same paradigm. In their 2005 papers (Davatzikos et al., 2005; Langleben et al., 2005), where the same data appear to be reported twice (analysed in two different ways), we find that:

1. The initial ACC and inferior parietal lobe findings are not replicated and the frontal activations described are of insufficient statistical significance to be reported by most neuroimaging groups (Z values of less than 3);

2.The parietal lobes (bilaterally) now exhibit greater activation during truthful responding than deceptive responding (c.f. Langleben et al., 2002); and

3.The behavioural and functional anatomical findings are reported differently across the 2005 papers: while truthful RTs appear only qualitatively longer than lie responses in Langleben et al. (2005), they are reported as significantly longer in Davazitkos et al. (2005); while very many regions exhibit greater activation during truthful responding in Langleben et al. (2005), a different subset of foci are maximally informative in Davazitkos et al. (2005; admittedly, following application of a different, and novel, analytic method)."

Conclusion

• Admits that brain activity previously associated with deception was driven by the task design
• Lie and Truth operate with a similar frontoparietal network, but lie still appears to be a more working-memory associated task
  

Work Cited

Langleben, et. al. Telling Truth From Lie in Individual Subjects With Fast Event-Related fMRI. University of Pennsylvania, 2005.

Federal Psycho-physiological Detection Of Deception Examiner Handbook. COUNTERINTELLIGENCE FIELD ACTIVITY TECHNICAL MANUAL October 2,2006

Temple-Raston. Neuroscientist Uses Brain Scan to See Lies Form. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15744871. NPR, 2009.

Spence, Sean. Playing Devil's Advocate: The Case against fMRI Lie Detection. Legal and Criminal Psychology (2008) 13, 11-25. The British Psychological Society, 2008.

Neuroscientist Uses Brain Scan to See Lies Form

Here's the link to my article from Tuesday.

Chelsey Article

here is the link ot my article...


http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jun/16-could-an-acid-trip-cure-your-ocd

Religious Relaxation

When God Makes a Difference

    The study conducted by McGregor, Nash, and Hirsh was based around the idea that religious conviction provided a level of certainty and relief from error, which allows those who are strong believers to ignore the inconsistencies that cause people anxiety. Their hypothesis stated that there was a neurophysiological reason for this decrease in anxious feelings, lying in the reduction of activity in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex.

What’s up the ACC?



      The Anterior Cingulate Cortex or ACC is a part of the forebrain located at the frontal part of the cingulated cortex, which lies above the corpus callosum. The ACC is a part of a variety of autonomic functions including blood pressure and heart rate as well as some processes involved in language production and acquisition as we’ve read about in the most recent T. Deacon chapters. However in this study the focus lay on the role of the ACC in more rational cognitive processes such as reward and anticipation and their role in the generation of anxious feelings. Much of the ACCs involvement in error processing lies in its activity in comparing what the intended outcome of a situation is and the actual out come, the ACC responds to an error by aiding in the production of anxious feelings, which allow the subject to become both consciously and physically aware of the error.
     The ACC is connected to the prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, and motor system. It is thus connected to the general system for regulating and modifying behavior. This regulation occurs in reaction to various anxiety producing events such as “the omission of error, the detection of conflict, or the experience of uncertainty.” They believe this to be true because those who are deeply involved in religion have provided for themselves a set of predictive guidelines for the world and occurrences therein. Religions provide meaning systems and moral parameters that the practitioner may operate within they are essentially guides for action and the perception of the actions of others. Anxiety is often caused by a dissonance between the expected action or situation and what actually occurs, those who seriously practice religion however are given rules that “constrain thought and perception away from discrepant or erroneous predictions”, they are able to ignore that which does not fit the teachings of their religion. The conscious reinterpretation of out of the religious box events into preexisting convictions acts as a sort of natural anti-anxiety medication, deadening the ACCs alarm bell for errors.

Study #1

     The first study used twenty-eight subjects who came from Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and other religious backgrounds (including non-religious). The researchers had them complete scaled that measured their personality, need for cognitive closure, behavioral inhibition and activation, as well as on their religious zeal. The religious zeal scale, on which they focused, had items that ranged from “I aspire to live and act according to my religious beliefs” to “I would support a war that defended my religious beliefs”. The participants were given a Stroop test, which consisted of a series of color words, each presented in a color that either matched or mismatched the meaning of the word. They were asked to respond to each word by pressing a button that either matched the color of the word or the color the word represented.

     To determine the ACC activity they measured event-related potential “which reflects the summation of the postsynaptic potentials of a large ensemble of synchronously active neurons” called the errorealted negativity or ERN. “The ERN is a sharp negative voltage deflection that typically peaks within 50 to 100 ms postresponse and reflects the preconscious monitoring of error, conflict, and uncertainty localized to the ACC “

The results showed that those who were more religiously zealous had less ERN activity, when an error was made the ACC did not react so strongly that they had a feeling of anxiety or any related emotion in making a mistake. They also found that the more zealous a participant was the less errors they made, they were more deliberate and careful in their answers. However the more zealous participants also answered questions faster suggesting a higher level of automatic thoughts, which allow them to answers quickly with more certainty.

Study #2

     The second study consisted of twenty-two participants whose religious preferences were not recorded. They were asked to complete a scale on their belief in God as well as an IQ test and the Big Five inventory, which measures five broad categories of personality traits. They also completed a similar Stroop test.

The results of the second study revealed, just as in the first, that a stronger belief in God led to les ERN activity as well as less incorrect answers. Having belief in God is most certainly a less intense form of religious zeal, however this did not diminish the fact that the participants had less anxiety related activity in their ACC.

These results suggest that religious conviction provides a framework for understanding and behavioral activity in the world, thus acting as a buffer against the anxiety provoking situations as well as “minimizing the experience of error”.

    Though these studies are based around religious constructs there is a strong possibility that conviction to any ideology could provide similar results.


Carter CS, Braver TS, Barch DM, Botvinick MM, Noll D, Cohen JD. Anterior cingulate cortex, error detection, and the online monitoring of performance. Science 1998; 280: 747–9.

MacDonald, Angus W., et al. "Dissociating the Role of the Dorsolateral Prefrontal and Anterior Cingulate Cortex in Cognitive Control." Science 288.5472 (2000): 1835-8.

Amygdala Medial Prefrontal Cortex Disconnect

A great amount of research has been conducted exploring how sleep deprivation weakens systems such as the immune system, weight control, cognitive processing (memory and learning) but there has been little inquiry into how sleep loss effects our emotional brain. Sleep deprivation has been commonly associated with several psychiatric disorders. It is thought that psychiatric and mood disorders, such as bi polar disorder, cause sleep loss. However, Mathew Walker and colleagues new study show that this isn’t necessarily the case as sleep deprivation, as the results from their study indicate, can itself be the cause of psychological instability.

The Study:
The study involved 26 healthy participants ages 18-30. The 26 subjects were divided in two groups: 12 were assigned to a sleep control group and the other 14 to a sleep deprivation group. All subjects had to refrain from ingesting caffeinated and alcoholic beverages for a total of 72 hours and followed a normal sleep/wake pattern for one week prior to the study (7 to 9 hours of sleep per night, waking hours: 6am -9pm). Their sleep/wake pattern was monitored by an actigraphy, a wristwatch movement sensor.

Pre-Study:
The sleep control group subjects had a normal night of sleep the night before the scanning. The sleep deprivation group remained awake for the entire night and the entire day before the scanning at 5pm (total of 35 hours of sleep deprivation).

Study/ fMRI Scanning:
The subjects were shown 100 images ranging from neutral to gruesome (i.e. basket on table to images of burn victims). Each image was shown for 10 seconds and the subjects were asked to quickly rate their emotional response through a button system, this was also to insure that all subjects remained awake and alert during the experiment. The subjects were in fMRI scanners during this whole process. Mathews and his colleagues were particularly looking for reactions in the amygdala, and curious to see if there were any significant differences between the sleep control group and the sleep deprivation group.

Results:
Both groups had similar emotional responses to the neutral images, but as the images became more and more aversive the fMRI scans showed that there were indeed great differences in how the brains were firing in the sleep-deprived subjects. In both groups the amygdala, as hypothesized, showed greater activity in response to the intense images, yet the sleep deprived subjects amygdala’s were 60% more active than the sleep control group subjects. Not only were the sleep deprived subjects amygdalas showing a stronger activation but also the volume of the amygdala that was activated (greater amount of neurons being activated) was three times that of the sleep control subjects.


It also became evident when observing the fMRI scans that there was a difference in the brain wiring of the control subjects and the sleep control subjects. The control subjects amygdalas maintained normal communication with the medial-prefrontal cortex (MPFC), however; the sleep deprivation participants amygdalas appeared to have lost connectivity with the MPFC and were instead communicating with regions of the autonomic nervous system.



Why is this loss of connectivity with the MPFC significant?

The MPFC communicates with the amygdala as it sends connections to the amygdalas central nucleus and brain stem outputs of the central nucleus. The MPFC serves as an “inhibitory, top-down control of amygdala function, resulting in contextually appropriate emotional responses.”






Maria Morgan, working in Joseph LeDoux’s lab, researched damaged MPFC and found that some lesions of MPFC resulted in exaggerated fear reactions. When the amygdala is reacting to fear the MPFC remains inactive and vice versa. When the MPFC is damaged increased anxiety occurs as the amygdala is left “unchecked” by the MPFC. This often leads to a difficulty with decision making in emotional situations. This research supports Mathews and colleagues’ findings. However, in their case study a lack of connectivity between the MPFC and amygdala wasn’t caused by lesions in the MPFC but rather by a lack of sleep.



The heightened emotional state occurs when threatening or in this case disturbing stimuli goes unchecked by the MPFC, and this greater activation of the amygdala communicates with the autonomic nervous system that in turn can lead to fight or flight responses.

Stimuli that activate the fight or flight response trigger the brains periventricular system PVS, commonly known as the brains punishment circuit. The PVS is composed of the hypothalamus, the thalamus, and the gray substance around the Sylvius. Acetylcholine activates emission of a hormone known as adrenal cortico-trophic ACTH which activate the adrenal glands to release adrenalin that prepares the body for fight or flight response.

This case study highlights the great importance of sleep. While more research must be done on the connection of sleep deprivation and mood disorders it is clear that sleep loss affects those without symptoms of psychiatric disorders as well. Most of us have experienced the altered state after pulling an all nighter. Now there is evidence that our brains are literally rewiring to create a heightened emotional state. As more research is conducted sleep might be taken more seriously in terms of psychological instabilities. Perhaps certain careers that often keep employees awake for hours on end who’s decision making is crucial will be reconsidered. For example, medical workers.

Sources:

LeDoux, Joseph. Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.

Swaminathan Nikhil. “Can a Lack of Sleep Cause Psychiatric Disorders? Study shows that sleep deprivation leads to a rewiring of the brain’s emotional circuitry” Scientific American. October 23 2007. Get link

Walker, Mathew P. et al. “The human emotional brain without sleep- a prefrontal amygdala disconnect.” Current Biology. Vol 17 No 20.

Walker, Mathews P. et al “ Supplemental Data: The human emotional brain without sleep- a prefrontal-amygdala disconnect” Current Biology. Vol 17 No 20.

“The Amygdala and its Allies.” The Brain from Top to Bottom
http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/i/i_04/i_04_cr/i_04_cr_peu/i_04_cr_peu_1a.jpg

article for april 14th

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090304160400.htm

Article for 4/14

Here's my article for April 4th