The Effect of Senders’ Perceived Ability to Control Emotion on Raters’ Deception Judgments

Abstract. The present studies aimed to examine whether the raters’ impressions of the senders’ ability to control emotion could influence the raters’ judgments of deceit and to explore the underlying mechanism. It was proposed that perceived emotional control ability would influence individuals’ deception judgments either by itself or by interacting with actual lie-related behaviors. Two experiments were conducted to examine our hypotheses. The results revealed that if participants were informed that the sender had a higher emotional control ability, they would judge the sender as less truthful in an actual deception judgment task (Study 1). It was also found that perceived emotional control ability did interact with actual lie-related behaviors: participants judged behaviors violating expectations or social norms as more deceptive (Study 2).