Core Studies: Hancock

• What does it study?

  Contemporary study of the language of psychopaths
• Background part 1?

  1. a psychopath is defined as a person who has low capacity for moral responsibility and is extremely selfish
  2. a way to identify them is their language. previously it was believed that they were eloquent and coherent, due to how psychopaths were portrayed in the media
• Background part 2?

  3. this was disproved by researchers eg Patrick said psychopaths are incoherent when speaking in comparison to non-psychopaths, and Clerkly said psychopaths are more likely to go off on a tangent compared to controls

  4. Hancock wanted to explore this further by comparing psychopathic and non-psychopathic murderers through three language indicators; poverty of affect, predatory world view and socio-economic needs
• The aim of Hancock?

  Examine whether the language psychopathic murderers use is different to non-psychopathic murderers.
• Research method

  Self-report using StepWise interview technique. Face to face semi-structured interview with open ended questions.
• Describe the sample

  52 male murderers in Canadian prisons. 38 non-psychopathic and 14 psychopathic. All had admitted their crime and volunteered to take part.
• Describe how participants were split into psychopaths and non-psychopaths

  Ps who volunteered using Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. They assessed if each were a psychopath or not, but they lowered the normal score from 30/40 to 25/40. This test was carried out by trained prison psychologists or trained researchers. Then 10 trained graduate students would recode 10 randomly selected files which showed a significant correlation in scores and high inter-rater reliability.
• what was the procedure?


  Ps interviewed by 2 senior psych grads & 1 research assistant, audio-taped. Given brief of aim & procedure, then p asked to describe their homicide not leaving out any details, prompted using StepWise technique, 25 minutes & were double-blind. Interviews transcribed as close to verbatim as possible, analysed using Wmatrix programme and DAL software. W-speech & semantics of phs together compared to non-phs, with tagged parts of speech eg verbs, semantic concepts eg time. D-examine properties of language, pleasantness & intensity of emotional lang analysed individually.
• Explain the findings

  1. predatory world view: instrumental language analysis, phs more likely to use subordinating conjunctions (cause and effect words eg so) to justify crime
  2. socio-economic needs: phs used approx twice as many words relating to basic physiological needs eg food when describing crime while non-phs used significantly more language related to social needs eg religion
  3. poverty of affect: phs used more past tense verbs eg stabbed not stab and greater use of concrete nouns (not emotions/abstract nouns)-detached from crime/less fluent, less positive, less emotionally intense
• What were the conclusions?

  1. psychopaths more likely than non-psychopaths to use describe cause and effect relationships when describing their murders
  2. psychopaths more likely view crime as logical outcome of a plan than non-psychopaths
  3. psychopaths focus on basic physiological needs than high level social needs than non-psychopaths
  4. psychopaths more emotionally detached from their crimes
  5. psychopaths less emotional and less positive in their speech