From the compulsively lying psychopath to the interrupted extremist or even the occasional innocent caught up in the fray, being able to determine whether someone is lying or telling the truth is invaluable, particularly in interrogative, law enforcement settings when lives are on the line. Millions of dollars of funding, thousands of man-hours and hundreds of studies have been dedicated to investigating liars and ways to thwart their deceptive ways. A challenge of interpreting thousands of pages of research in the field of deception detection is ameliorating the conflicting designs and results; different factions within the field arguing the validity of the other side’s theory and results makes this task even more difficult. What cues do people use to accurately detect deception? Can we train people to be alert to certain cues to increase their accuracy? Are certain people better liars or lie detectors than others? If so, can we capitalize on certain strategies to increase deception detection rates across the board? Prior research in the field has investigated these claims. Thanks to meta-analytic techniques, some of these questions have even been answered to a certain extent. However, the overwhelming majority of lie detection studies ignore the best, most successful liars the human race has to offer: psychopaths. 
	The proposed line of research brings together ideas from both clinical and experimental psychology to answer a question that has never been examined in the published literature: What strategies do people scoring higher on measures of psychopathy use in an interrogation setting and how do these strategies differ from people with lower scores? Most extant research examining psychopaths and deception detection uses incarcerated samples. A handful of recent studies use non-incarcerated samples, but severely limit the psychopaths’ ability to manipulate by not including interactions between the interrogator and the suspect. Furthermore, no research has examined psychopathic tendencies of the interrogator in these situations and how that may affect the course of the interrogation.

This proposed project is exploratory in nature but nevertheless founded on theory and established research from both clinical and experimental branches of psychology. Because the project attempts to carve a new niche where these two branches overlap, the results have the potential to significantly influence future, lie detection research. If psychopathic tendencies do, in fact, influence behaviors in the interrogation room, future research could focus on identifying and either counteracting the strategies used by suspects or developing training to capitalize on the strategies used by interrogators. However, if no such strategies emerge, both researchers in the fields of deception detection and law enforcement professionals could breath a collective sigh of relief at the fact that psychopaths are not indomitable abnormalities, immune to any attempts to detect deception. 
	Furthermore, this project gives a budding, primary investigator—a female of Middle Eastern descent—the opportunity to make an entrance into the competitive field of academe with an important, potentially very impactful, contribution to the field of psychology, while providing practitioners new and better strategies to detect deception. 
