Reading bodily cues may protect against deception in old age

We know that older people are at high risk of falling prey to scams, and that a number of factors related to ageing can contribute to this. A tendency to evaluate faces more positively is one example, as well as a decreased inability to discern trustworthy and untrustworthy behaviour.

Yet there may be one way that older adults can decrease their chance of getting scammed, according to a new study in the Journals of Gerontology: Series B. There, a US- and Canada-based team finds that nurturing interoception, or attentiveness to bodily signals, could help them better detect deception.

Participants were a mix of younger adults in their 20s, and older adults in their 60s. Firstly, they took part in seven experimental trials in which they were asked to count their own heartbeats for around 13 seconds, focusing inwards rather than actually checking their pulse. At the same time, their actual heart rate was recorded via a monitor on their finger.

They then viewed 16 real-life short video clips, gathered from a number of Western news agencies, of 10 men and 6 women pleading for the safe return of a missing relative. Half of the videos showed someone who it later emerged had been responsible for the disappearance, and subsequently convicted of kidnapping/murder, while the other half were genuine. After each video, participants indicated whether they thought the person in the video was lying or telling the truth.

After this, participants were shown 40 emails from one of four categories: real phishing emails, which had been used to scam people in the past; fake phishing emails, generated by the team; real safe emails, from genuine banks and companies; and simulated safe emails.

Those who were better at detecting their own heartbeat were much better at detecting whether people were lying in the videos, particularly in older people — and in fact, the association between greater interoceptive ability and better lie detection increased as participant age increased. There was no significant relationship between interoceptive ability and lie detection in younger participants.

Although the phishing email was a different format to the video — much "drier", as one of the study's authors puts it — there were similar results in this part of the study. As adults got older, those with higher interoceptive ability were better and better at detecting lies. Overall, older adults who could more accurately detect their own heartbeat were around 15% to 20% better at detecting lies and scams delivered both in person and via emails than older adults with less heartbeat awareness.

This might seem counterintuitive: we might expect younger people to be better at tuning into their bodily signals and to use those signals to detect lies. The team suggests, however, that younger people might be more reliant on their cognitive faculties: rather than using their body to work out whether someone is lying, they use logic and reasoning. (Though this isn't mentioned in the study, younger people may also be better at detecting some of the cues present in phishing emails, being generally more technologically adept than older people.)

The team also suggests there may be some neurological basis to the idea that lower interoceptive capacity may be related to decreased lie detection. They note that "the anterior insula cortex has been associated with trust perception... [and] redacted insula volume with age may be a marker of low deception detection related to reduced interoceptive accuracy in later life". Future research could explore these mechanisms.

Though there are lots of reasons why interoceptive ability might decrease over time, there are ways to increase that ability. The team specifically mentions mindfulness practices, which can help people tune into their bodies, as well as heartbeat perception training. This could benefit us all, but may be specifically helpful for older adults who want to ensure that they are in touch with themselves — and with the intentions of others.

Read the paper in full:
Heemskerk, A., Lin, T. Pehlivanoglu, D., Hakim, Z., Valdes-Hernandez, P. A., ten Brinke, L., Grilli, M. D., Wilson, R. C., Turner, G. R., Spreng, R. N., Ebner, N. C. (2024) Interoceptive Accuracy Enhances Deception Detection in Older Adults, The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 79(11) https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbae151
 
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