Based on Cleve Backster’s overarching concept for the polygraph that a person’s fears, anxieties, and apprehensions will be directed to that situation which holds the greatest threat to his or her well-being or self-preservation at that point in time. In the polygraph examination, a guilty examinee’s concern over an intense relevant question may result in a full or partial dampening of responses to other questions. The anti-climax dampening concept remains a proposed explanation for an often-observed phenomenon in which examinees sometimes react only to a single relevant question when they are actually being deceptive to two or more in the same test. The concept is a description, however, and not an explanation. See: Backster (1963a).
