One More Time without Feeling: Detecting Fabricated Remorse Using Linguistic Analysis

Despite the benefits to be gained from successfully feigning the emotion of remorse, few studies have addressed the identification of fabricated statements of remorse. We investigated whether there were differences in first person singular pronoun use between genuine versus deceptive displays of remorse in typewritten statements of remorse. Results showed that participants produced a significantly higher proportion of first person singular pronouns (I, me, and my) in their genuine versus deceptive statements. These findings suggest there are measurable differences in language use between genuine and falsified expressions of remorse and highlight the potential utility of language analysis in the identification of true versus fabricated statements of remorse.