The aim of the experiments was to investigate the effect of STRESS vs. EXERICISE sweat on unrelated individuals ("Detectors").
When his team then measures their galvanic skin response - ie sweat production, which is what lie-detector tests monitors - there is a jump in the reading.
8. Mistake detector: In a blast at the sweat machines known as lie detectors, the maven wrote, "That was one fewer career lost to the predatory polygraph".
First is a simple pair of 'finger cuffs', long used in lie-detector tests, which record the changing sweat levels on the skin as a measure of mental arousal and making no distinction between positive or negative.
"You might discover that these guys could all pass lie-detector tests because their hands don't sweat — maybe it's as simple as that," he said.
Actually, measuring sweat is one of the ways that the polygraph test (the "lie detector" in all the movies) determines a lie.
Since we wanted to determine whether there were gender effects, either for donor sex, detector sex, or donor*detector sex, in half of the STRESS conditions we used male donor stress sweat, and in the other half we used female donor stress sweat, with runs counter-balanced for order between participants.
"The lie detector is just an instrument that records autonomic responses like heart rate, blood pressure, emotional sweating.
Lie detector tests, or polygraphs, do not measure lying; they measure the fear of getting caught in a lie, by tracking things like heart rate, blood pressure and sweat, which are considered to be good reflections of anxiety levels.
