Psychophysiological detection of deception: Current status and future prospects

Methods for the psychophysiological detection of deception aim at differentiating between offenders and innocent persons on the basis of their physiological responses to specific questions. The current article describes the most important questioning techniques, the Control or Comparison Question Test and the Guilty Knowledge Test, and evaluates their psychometric quality especially with respect to the validity of autonomic physiological measures. Furthermore, recent advantages in this field that mainly concern the application of electroencephalographic and neuroimaging techniques are highlighted and critically discussed. Whereas these latter methods are currently not sufficiently elaborated for practical use, the Guilty Knowledge Test could be implemented in the field as a scientifically accepted test that yields high validity coefficients even on the basis of autonomic measures.