Dr. Leanne ten Brinke says most people can spot a psychopath in just five seconds by reading facial expressions alone.
The University of British Columbia psychologist, who directs the Truth and Trust Lab, made the claim during a recent appearance on Steven Bartlett’s “Diary of a CEO” podcast. Ten Brinke, Ph.D., sat down with the “Dragon’s Den” investor to break down the hidden red flags that expose liars, psychopaths and narcissists in everyday encounters.
“Most people think a psychopath looks dangerous, they picture the villain in a movie, but that’s not how it works in real life,” she said on the podcast. Ten Brinke explained that individuals with psychopathic traits often display what researchers call “Duchenne” smiles — expressions that appear genuine but lack authentic emotional engagement.
The key distinction lies in the activation around the eyes. Genuine smiles produce telltale signs like crow’s feet, while psychopathic smiles feature upturned lips without any corresponding eye movement — essentially the phenomenon commonly described as “dead around the eyes.” Ten Brinke noted that people high in psychopathic traits would show “very happy looking smiles, as they were saying really hostile things,” often accompanied by “a lot of hand gestures.”
The research backing these claims originated with psychologist Scott Lillenfeld and his colleagues, who conducted a study using brief video clips of criminal offender interviews. Participants watched five-, ten- and twenty-second segments while rating subjects on psychopathic personality traits.
“And then you had a random psychology student volunteer watching five seconds of that interaction, and making a rating of, ‘how callous do they seem, how manipulative do they seem,'” ten Brinke explained on Bartlett’s show. The results revealed what she called a “pretty reasonable correlation” between untrained viewers’ snap judgments and the assessments of clinical psychologists who conducted hours-long interviews with collateral information.
Following Lillenfeld’s initial findings, ten Brinke’s team partnered with his researchers to analyze the verbal and non-verbal behaviors that drove these rapid impressions. Their work examined precisely what caught people’s attention during those brief exposures.
Beyond psychopathic smiles, ten Brinke has investigated emotional deception in high-stakes public appeals. She studied individuals who pleaded to media outlets for help finding missing loved ones — cases where some speakers were genuinely grieving and others were concealing their own involvement in the crime.
“In genuine sadness, you get the downturn lip corners,” she said during the podcast interview. “What tends to be more difficult, is the combination in the eyebrows.”
Deceptive speakers displayed a different pattern entirely. “Instead of the inner eyebrows going upward and together, the whole inner and outer eyebrows would go up, but not together,” ten Brinke noted, describing what read as “more surprise” rather than authentic grief.
The psychologist acknowledged that five seconds provides limited information. Still, she added, the accumulated research suggests you can “get a sense of someone relatively quickly” — though deeper personality assessment requires extended interaction.
Ten Brinke’s appearance on Bartlett’s podcast comes as public fascination with psychological profiling continues to surge through streaming true-crime content. Her findings offer a scientific framework for instincts many people already suspect: that fleeting facial cues can betray character traits deliberately concealed in conversation.
The “Diary of a CEO” podcast regularly features experts across psychology, business and personal development for its audience of entrepreneurs and professionals seeking competitive insight into human behavior.