Deception is a common phenomenon in daily life, which is defined as a deliberate attempt to mislead others. People lie for different reasons. Some lies are self-oriented, e.g., lying to protect social relationships. Some lies are other-oriented, e.g., lying to escape punishment for transgressions. The self-oriented lies usually do not harm, and to some extent are beneficial to social interactions. While the other-oriented lies may have serious consequences for society, especially in special domains like security, legal systems and so on. However, to detect deception accurately and timely has been proved to be a great challenge. Studies revealed that people’s ability to detect deception was only slightly above chance level, with an average of 54%. Although nonverbal cues, especially the visual nonverbal cues are crucial for deception detection, previous studies mainly have focused on facial cues to deception (e.g., micro-expressions), while body cues have long been neglected. In fact, body cues are also important information carriers in our interpersonal interactions, which could be used to identify emotions, identities, deceptive intentions and so on.

The present study first illustrates the possibility and necessity of the application of body cues in deception detection. Cue theories, which claim that the mental difference between liars and truth tellers would be reflected in the observable behaviors, theoretically explain the possibility. Besides, because people are used to pay attention to their own facial and verbal expressions while neglect body movements, the truth may be revealed through body movements consciously or unconsciously. For the necessity, body cues play an important role in situations that could be easily influenced by factors like distance or noise. What’s more, effectively using a combination of body cues and other cues are beneficial for the accuracy of deception detection.

Second, the study reviews studies of body cues to deception in two levels. At the functional level, the study mainly focuses on illustrators, adaptors, and emblems. At the anatomical level, the study mainly focuses on head movements, posture shifts, hand/finger movements, and leg/foot movements. Results reveal that there are almost no reliable body cues to deception. The study then discusses the results in two points, the first is that the interaction of different mental processes, like emotion, cognitive load and behavioral control, may influence the behavioral cues; the second is that the behavioral cues shown up might be influenced by many factors, such as context, motivation, stakes and so on.

Finally, the study proposes points that should be considered in future studies. The first is about research approaches. Many previous studies assumed that liars were highly arousal and had a high cognitive load, however, what should be noted is that truth tellers may have the same mental processes. Recently, the imposing-cognitive-load approach was proposed. It has been proved that the approach had a greater impact on the cognitive load of liars than that of truth tellers, which could be used to explore body cues to deception. The second is about the measurement of body cues. The traditional manual coding method needs to be supplemented by computer-assisted technologies, such as computer vision techniques.