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1. Introduction
Deception, defined as the intentional attempt to mislead others, is a challenging task. Especially in interpersonal settings, telling a lie requires a great deal of cognitive control (Johnson et al., 2005; Spence et al., 2004). The liar has to come to the deliberate decision to lie, inhibit the truthful response, generate a credible and consistent false response, memorize it and manage the cognitive conflict between the true and the false answer (Botvinick et al., 2001; Nuñez et al., 2005; Spence et al., 2008). Yet, the deceptive act cannot be reduced to these cognitive processes only, and recent neuroimaging studies consider the social interaction as another important determinant for deception (Abe et al., 2007; Baumgartner et al., 2009; Carrión et al., 2010; Sip et al., 2012). The social aspect of deception emphasizes the role of emotional processes and the requirement for emotion regulation while deceiving somebody (Abe et al., 2007; Baumgartner et al., 2009; Sip et al., 2013). Accordingly, successful liars have to suppress their true emotions and control for emotional expression while monitoring the emotions of the cheated person so as to adapt their response and fake emotions if necessary. Furthermore, they have to cope with feelings of guilt about lying or fear of getting caught lying (Zuckerman et al., 1981). Hence liars experience a stronger emotional load than truth tellers (Caso et al., 2005; Ekman, 1992; Moran and Schweitzer, 2008; Sip et al., 2013), which in turn may impair the liar’s deceptive performance (Baumgartner et al., 2013; Carrión et al., 2010). Taken together, it can be assumed that deception challenges the liar not only cognitively but also emotionally, which requires emotion regulation processes, especially when deceiving the opponent face-to-face.
The regulation of emotions is defined by Gross (1998) as processes that influence which emotions individuals have, when they have them and how they experience and express these emotions. This study focusses on the explicit emotion regulation processes and refers to the process model of emotion regulation by Gross and Thompson (2007). According to this model, two broad explicit emotion regulation strategies can be distinguished depending on when they have their primary effect. Antecedent-focussed strategies already...