Neural impacts of personality on deception for applications of deception detection

Background: Although universal, deception may be a sign of certain mental disorders and may impede the effectiveness of clinical intervention. However, individual difference exists in deception, and its underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear, thereby limiting the applicability of deception detection for clinical diagnosis.

Method: Functional near-infrared spectroscopy and multiple aspects of personality assessments [the Behavioral Approach System and the Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS) scale, and the Neuroticism-Extroversion-Openness Five-Factor Inventory scale] were applied to explore the neural mechanisms underlying individual differences in deception. Furthermore, a transformer-based model considering personality traits was developed to help people detect deception.

Results: Results showed that personality traits influenced deception primarily through activity in the frontopolar area, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and temporoparietal junction area. Moreover, personality traits from different aspects jointly influenced deception, which may vary with behavioral changes. Specifically, extroversion is one of the personality traits partially mediating the effect of BIS on the frontopolar area during deception while being masked during honesty. Additionally, the deception-detection model was found to obtained good classification performance (area under curve: 0.93 ± 0.047), where personality variables contributed to improving the performance.

Conclusions: These findings demonstrated the potential neural impacts of personality in deception for explaining individual differences, which holds great promise in improving the applicability of deception detection for clinical diagnosis.