Face and tone of voice in the communication of deception.

The contributions of face and tone of voice (filtered speech) to the communication of honest and deceptive messages were examined. In general, tone of voice was a better source of deception and than the face. In addition, raters' judgments of the combined audiovisual channel were better predicted from their judgments of tone of voice when the message was deceptive and from their judgments of the face when the message was honest. The relative importance of face and tone of voice was also affected by the availability of verbal content— when content was available the face became less important. Thus, judges obtained more information from facial cues that were added to filtered speech (a comparison between filtered speech and face plus filtered speech) than from facial cues that were added to the full voice (a comparison between the voice and face plus voice). In addition, judgments of the audiovisual channel without content (face plus filtered speech) were better predicted from judgments of the face, whereas judgments of the audiovisual channel with content (face plus full voice) were better predicted from judgments of filtered speech. Finally, the relative importance of face and tone of voice was also determined by the affect that was communicated. Tone of voice was a better source of information about dominance and submission; the face revealed more information and was more highly correlated with the combined audiovisual channel for communications of liking and disliking. The present study investigated the relative importance of face and tone of voice in the communication of honest and deceptive messages; these messages concerned the sender's feelings about four target persons: someone they liked, someone they disliked, someone they dominated, and someone to whom they submitted (cf. DePaulo Mehrabian & Ferris, 1967). These considerations are reviewed below. The choice of the target persons was based on