That's a pertinent question in relation to the article submitted here. The main answer to your question is that there don't seem to be any invariant behaviors, or even reliable behaviors, associated with lying.[1] Some people are "naturally" capable of lying shamelessly, and many other people can be trained to lie while beating any lie detection system based on physical signs.

The best methods for detecting lying when (for example) conducting a police investigation or engaging in foreign intelligence is to analyze the liar's statements for inconsistencies. Statement analysis that prompts new questions in a structured interview is the best way to detect deception, because it's hard to make up a consistent set of story details in advance when making up a story.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/0...

http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20079233,00....

http://www.amazon.com/A-Tremor-In-The-Blood/dp/0306457822

[2] http://leb.fbi.gov/2011/june/evaluating-truthfulness-and-det...

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=5GjTLtibmXYC&oi=...

From this very interesting book-length article: "Professors William G. Iacono and David T. Lykken of the University of Minnesota provided important comments on our chapter on polygraph countermeasures." Professor Iacono is an occasional, always thoughtful, participant in the "journal club" on behavior genetics in the University of Minnesota Department of Psychology that I join during each school year. The late Professor Lykken himself wrote a whole book on why polygraph examinations are a bad idea,

http://www.amazon.com/A-Tremor-In-The-Blood/dp/0306457822

and his writings helped convince the Minnesota legislature not to allow polygraph results for any judicial or employment-screening purpose in the state. It's ludicrous that the federal government and some state judicial systems still rely so much on such an inherently unreliable, unvalidated technology.

"We are especially grateful to retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent Dr. Drew C. Richardson for his suggestions regarding the second edition of this book."

Yes, after being burned by false polygraph results many times, SOME (but not enough) federal law enforcement agents are recognizing that polygraph examinations are useless for finding the truth.