Pressing harder on the paper and writing longer strokes with your pen could indicate you're telling lies, according to new research by Israel's University of Haifa.
While research is in its developmental stage, scientists believe they could be on the way to identifying components of handwriting that show when someone is lying, the UK's Daily Mail reported.
Researchers at the university's faculty of social welfare and health sciences asked 34 volunteers to write two paragraphs using a wireless electronic pen with a pressure-sensitive tip on a computer tablet. One paragraph required the volunteers to recall an actual memory and a fabricated event for the second paragraph.
The volunteers wrote on a piece of paper placed on the tablet and a computer monitored and analysed the writing to reveal the differences in writing style.
"In the false writing condition, the average pressure, stroke length and height were significantly higher than in the true writing condition," the researchers wrote in Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology.
With further testing on a wider scale, the technology could be used by banks to analyse loan applications and perhaps even insurance companies to check up on claims.
"It seems that the act of writing a false text involves extensive cognitive resources and the automatic act of writing is thereby affected," the researchers said.
Your say: Do you think this technology will be beneficial? How would you like to see it used?
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