Hancock - Measuring Differences - Language of Psychopaths

• Background: What is a psychopath?

  • Psychopaths are individuals who exhibit abnormally high levels of selfishness and seemingly lack a conscience
• Background: How can language provide insight into underlying cognitive and emotional processes?

  • Many aspects of the new ways which we express ourselves are unconscious and automatic  
• Background: What features of language can reveal things about our personalities?

  • Disfluencies
  • How emotionally coloured our speech is
  • Use of past and present tense
• Background: What did Porter et al (2009) find?

  • Found psychopathic offenders in the Canadian penal system were approximately 2.5 times more likely than non psychopaths to be successful in their parole applications despite being more likely to reoffend 

   
• Background: What is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs?

  • Self actualisation - ability to reach true potential
  • Esteem - respect
  • Love and belonging - intimacy and friendship
  • Safety - health, security
  • Physiological needs - air, water, food, clothing, reproduction etc
• What were the aims?

  To use text analysis to analyse language characteristics of psychopaths in describing their violent crimes, focusing on 3 characteristics: 

  1. Instrumental / predatory world view – Using subordinating conjunctions
  2. Unique socioemotional needs – Psychopaths show little need for others and more concerned with basic needs (food and sex) and language should focus upon these needs 
  3. Poverty of effect – Their lack of emotional intelligence may be reflected using fewer emotional words, more disfluencies and psychological distancing by using past tense  
• What was the design?

  • Quasi experiment (being psychopath natural) 
  • IVs – Psychopath and Non Psychopath  
  • DV – Measures of language from text analysis  
  • Independent measures 
  • Semi structured interviews 

   
• How was psychopathy measured?

  • Psychopathy checklist revised 20 criteria scored from 0-2 giving a max score of 40 

   

  Based on 2 factors:  

  Factor 1 – affective / interpersonal traits e.g. lack of remorse 

  Factor 2 – impulsive and antisocial traits – criminal versatility and paralytic lifestyle  

   

  • Score of 25+ indicates psychopathy 
• How was the text analysed?

  • Wmatrix to classify types of words 

  Used to compare parts of speech and it classifies speech in relation to nouns, verbs etc and also semantic categories such as money  

   

  • Dictionary of effect in language to classify emotional context  

  Effect of tone of words, positive and negative use of language, use of imagery and intensity of words 
• Procedure: PCL-R:

  • All completed by trained prison psychologists. Inter-rater reliability was gained by having a trained graduate student recode 10 randomly selected case files 
• Procedure: Interviews:

  • All audiotaped, participants told at the start the study was to examine the manner in which homicide offenders recall their homicide offence  
  • Stepwise technique – asked to describe their offence in as much detail from beginning to end 
  • Conducted by 2 senior psychology graduate students and 1 research assistant who were blind to psychopathy scores of offenders and lasted about 25 minutes 
  • At the start of each interview participants were verbally briefed on aims and procedure of the study 
• What were the findings?

  • Predatory world view - Use more subordinating conjunctions which suggests they were describing cause and effect relationships between events of their murder~
  • Socioemotional needs - Used twice as many Maslow “basic needs” words compared to non psychopaths which suggests they are concerned with their own needs
  • Poverty of effect - Used more past tense verbs and fewer present tense, more articles and more concrete nouns than non psychopaths which suggests they viewed murder more in past and more emotionally distant from the crime than non psychopaths     
• What were the findings in regards to DAL scores?

  • No difference between emotional language (DAL scores) 
  • There was a difference with Factor 1 alone  
  • Factor 1 negatively correlated with emotionally intense language  
• What was found in regards to disfluencies?

  • Psychopath’s language was less fluent with more disfluencies than non psychopaths 
• What was the sample?

  • 52 male murderers in Canadian correctional facilities  
  • Self selected  
  • 14 psychopaths and 38 non psychopaths 

   

  • Mean age at time of murder was 28 years old 

   

  • There was no difference in the type of murder or in terms of age and time since crime committed in psychopaths and non psychopaths – control for participant variables