Frank, Mark

Mark G. Frank is a professor of communication and director of the Communication Science Center at the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York. A social psychologist by training, he is a well-known and respected deception researcher and an expert in the area of nonverbal communication. His work is characterized by an applied focus, especially as related to law enforcement, and by its association with the ideas of Paul Ekman.

Frank earned his Ph.D. in social psychology from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1989. With a National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Mental Health, Frank did postdoctoral research in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco Medical School, where he began his association with Ekman. In 1992, Frank accepted a position at the School of Psychology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. In 1996, he joined the Department of Communication at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In 2005, be accepted a position in the Communication Department at the University of Buffalo in New York, where he was promoted to the rank of full professor.

[Page 393]Frank has published numerous scholarly articles and book chapters on the topics of nonverbal communication, especially facial expressions, and deception detection. His most well-known works include collaborations with Ekman, Maureen O'Sullivan, and Thomas Feeley. In his research, Frank has advocated for the importance of studying high-stakes lies in deception detection and the idea that momentary facial expressions provide useful signals in lie detection. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security.

One of Frank's best-known studies was published in Psychological Science in 1999. Ekman, O'Sullivan, and Frank compared people with a variety of occupations in terms of their skill at detecting lies. Federal officers did better than other groups on a lie detection task, and were 73 percent accurate, compared with sheriffs (67 percent), federal judges (62 percent), psychologists (58 percent to 68 percent), and law enforcement officers (51 percent). The finding of substantial occupational differences in deception detection ability, however, generally has not been replicated in the research literature as a whole, and therefore findings on occupational differences are controversial.

Frank and Ekman reported an informative experiment in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2004. They had subjects lie or tell the truth in two different types of situations, a mock crime and an opinion about a current event. The truths and lies were then shown to a sample of raters who judged each for honesty. The main findings were that some people were much more believable than others, and that people who were believable in one situation tended to be believable in the other situations. This suggests that some people are much better liars than others.

A third example of Frank's work is an examination of research investigating the effectiveness of training people to detect lies. After examining 20 prior experiments, Frank and Feeley found that nonverbal training in deception detection skills improved accuracy from an average of 54 percent to an average of 58 percent. Nonverbal training appears to improve deception detection accuracy, but it does not seem to improve accuracy very much. Frank and Feeley discussed ways to improve the effectiveness of training.

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