Howard S. Friedman

H. S. Friedman (Howard S. Friedman) is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside, where he received his doctorate from Harvard University as a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. While Friedman's career has primarily focused on health psychology, personality, and longevity research, he contributed to the deception detection literature during the 1980s and 1990s through collaborations with social psychologists studying nonverbal communication and behavioral cues to deception.

Friedman's deception-related work centered on individual differences in deceptive ability and the role of nonverbal expressiveness in lie-telling. With Ronald Riggio, he published influential studies on individual differences and cues to deception, examining how personality traits, social skills, and nonverbal behaviors influence both the ability to deceive successfully and observers' judgments of truthfulness. He also collaborated extensively with Bella M. DePaulo on nonverbal communication research, contributing to foundational understanding of how emotional expressiveness and communication styles relate to deception. His work established that behavioral cues can discriminate between truth and deception, though naive observers often fail to use these cues correctly.

Friedman received the Outstanding Contributions to Health Psychology Award from the American Psychological Association and the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science. His deception work was cited by major researchers in the field, including those conducting comprehensive meta-analyses on cues to deception. However, deception detection represented only a brief phase of Friedman's broader research program—his primary scholarly focus has been on personality predictors of health and longevity, particularly through his eight-decade archival study of the Terman cohort.

Friedman's deception research fits within his wider interest in personality and social psychology. His work on affective communication and expressive behavior informed both his deception studies and his later health psychology research, demonstrating how individual differences in emotional expression and nonverbal communication relate to various social and health outcomes. Though he moved away from deception research to focus on health and longevity, his early contributions helped establish the importance of personality factors in understanding deceptive communication.