Lies Are Written All Over Your Face

April 30, 2008 — -- Michael White sat on the couch in his living room, sobbing as he grieved for the return of his pregnant wife. Liana was a gentle soul who never hurt anybody, he said through grief so convincing during a television interview that even his mother-in-law believed him.

"He was able to fool us all," Liana's mother said later after White led volunteer searchers to the ditch where he had dumped his wife's naked body and covered her with tree branches.

Eighteen months later, on Dec. 14, 2006, White was convicted of murdering his wife in their home in Edmonton, Canada, in front of their 3-year-old daughter, although he still claims he is innocent.

His performance had been very effective, convincing many that he was despondent over his wife's disappearance, despite the fact that his own face bore testimony that he was lying.

Those clues emerged in Stephen Porter's forensic psychology lab at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, after intense analysis of the television interview.

"We took a 33-second video clip and we analyzed it frame by frame, 30 frames per second, about 900 or so frames," Porter said during a telephone interview. "We found that throughout the video he attempted to present himself as being extremely distressed, sad, tearful, pleading for his wife's return. But when we looked at the video frame by frame we found instances of anger and very brief instances of disgust."

Those instances, less than a second long, are called micro-expressions, long believed to be incredibly brief expressions formed by muscles in the human face that are beyond control.

Porter's research expands upon work done by many others, including the well-known American psychologist Paul Ekman, who is working with security officials at several major U.S. airports to help them recognize the uncontrollable expressions that show a person is lying.

All of them, however, are building on a suggestion by Charles Darwin 126 years ago.

"A man when moderately angry, or even when enraged, may command the movements of his body, but … those muscles of the face, which are least obedient to the will, will sometimes alone betray a slight and passing emotion," Darwin wrote in "The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals."