Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 30, Issue 2, 1 April 2006, Pages 601-608
NeuroImage

Amygdala activation when one is the target of deceit: Did he lie to you or to someone else?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.09.038Get rights and content

Abstract

The ability to figure out whether a person is being honest or deceitful is an important part of social competence. Reactions to deceit may however differ depending on whether one is being deceived oneself or observes a deceitful exchange between others. In the present study, we investigated whether personal involvement influenced the neural responses associated with the detection of deceit. Subjects watched videos of actors lifting a box and judged whether the actors had been misled about the real weight of the box. Personal involvement was manipulated by having the participants themselves among the actors. The critical finding was that there was activity in amygdala and fusiform gyrus only for the condition in which participants observed themselves being deceived. In contrast, the superior temporal sulcus and anterior cingulate cortex were activated irrespective of whether the participants detected that the experimenter had deceived themselves or another. These four brain areas are all interconnected and are part of the discrete neural system subserving social cognition. Our results provide direct evidence, using judgments of deceit in a social context, that the crucial factor for amygdala activation is the involvement of the subjects because they are the target of the deceit. We interpret the activation of the amygdala in this situation as reflecting the greater affective reaction when one is deceived oneself. Our results suggest that when one is personally involved, deceit is taken as a potential threat.

Introduction

Successful social interactions depend on the ability to predict and explain the mental states of other people, such as desires, beliefs and intentions. It is particularly important to be able to distinguish whether a person is being honest or deceitful. To do so, one needs to process information that is relevant and directly available; this mainly consists in the movements of the agent in space and time in the physical and social environment (Barresi and Moore, 1996). According to Humphrey (1983), the human ability for perceiving subtle expressions and behaviors partly developed from the increasing competence in deceiving and manipulating each other among members of a social group.

In a recent experiment, Grèzes et al. (2004) explored the brain mechanisms involved in detecting deception from the perception of the non-verbal dynamic behavior of actors. When subjects detected deceptive intention, there was activity in the amygdala and in the anterior cingulate cortex. We suggested that the observer may have felt that the intention to deceive was directed towards him, and that as a result, the activations in the anterior cingulate gyrus and amygdala reflected the observer's emotional response of being deceived. In other words, we hypothesized that the critical factor might be personal involvement.

Two recent studies suggest that personal involvement might indeed be crucial. In a recent fMRI study, subjects were scanned while they read stories in which they or someone else either intentionally or accidentally violated social norms (Berthoz et al., 2003). Activation in the amygdala was only found when the participants read stories that narrated their own intentional transgression of social norms. In the second study, activation in the anterior cingulate was specifically found when subjects viewed faces which were making eye contact and when they heard their own name (Kampe et al., 2003).

Our previous experiment did not allow the conclusion that personal involvement is crucial for deceit (Grèzes et al., 2004). In the present experiment, we therefore manipulated whether the subject was or was not the target of deceit. Subjects were scanned while watching videos of themselves or of others lifting a box and were instructed to judge the presence of deceit. In the two conditions of interest, subjects judged whether the experimenter had misled them or another about the real weight of a box. Two comparison conditions were included in which the subjects judged the presence of deceit in the other direction that is whether the subjects themselves or the other actors misled the experimenter. The design was therefore factorial, with effects of self/other and direction of deceit. This enabled us to look for activations that related to who was the target of deceit. We were specifically interested in whether there were activations in the amygdala and in the cingulate that only occurred when one is the target of deceit.

Section snippets

Subjects

Six subjects (3 men and 3 women, with ages of 26–35 years old) with no neurological or psychiatric history participated in the imaging study. All gave informed consent according to procedures that had been approved by the Joint Ethics Committee of the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (UCLH NHS Trust) and Institute of Neurology (UCL).

Stimuli

Six actors (3 men and 3 women) were videotaped over 50 trials of lifting and carrying a box of varying weights (1, 6, 12 or 18 kg). Each recording

Behavioral analysis

The subjects were able to detect deception above a chance level. The mean judgments per subject were converted into a measure of sensitivity [d′] independent of any response bias (Macmillan and Creelman, 1991). The subjects were significantly sensitive to deceit (d′ = 1.183, t test P < 0.0001). Subjects tended to be less accurate at detecting when they themselves were the target of a lie (d′ = 0.924) than when they were lying (d′ = 1.145), or the other was the target of a lie (d′ = 1.243) or

Discussion

We hypothesized that in social situations, one's reactions to deceit might differ depending on whether one is directly involved by virtue of being the target compared with simply being a witness. In the present experiment, we were specifically interested in the activations associated with detecting that the experimenter had lied to the subject compared with activations when the subject detected that the experimenter had lied to another. So as to control for the judgment of a lie, these

Conclusion

In our experiment, subjects made judgments concerning deceit. We varied the target of deceit, that is, whether it was the subject who was being deceived or someone else. The finding was that the amygdala was only activated when the subjects detected that they themselves had been deceived. Previous animal and human studies have shown activity in the amygdala in response to threat. Our results suggest that humans perceive deception as a threat, but only when it is aimed at themselves.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the EU Fifth Framework Program (Contract N° QLG3-CT-2002-00746) and by the Wellcome Trust.

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