Hancock

• background


  • psychopaths are people who often come across as charming, intelligent and articulate but they lack any empathy and see other people as there to be used in order to achieve their own personal ends
  • the method used to measure psychopathy is called the PCL-R and assesses 20 traits
• aim


  • to investigate whether psychopaths use language differently to non-psychopaths, such that we could detect psychopathy based on how someone speaks)
• participants


  • 52 male murderers from Canadian prisons who had admitted to their crimes and volunteered to take part in the study
  • 14 psychopaths and 38 non-psychopaths
• procedure


  • each participant was assessed by a trained prison psychologist using the PCL-R
  • participants were then asked to describe their homicide offence in a s much detail as possible, this took 25 minutes with 2 senior graduates and 1 research assistant
  • narratives were audiotaped and transcribed
  • the speech was analysed using two computer programmes: one analysed the percentage of each feature of language used and one compared the use of emotional language by each individual
• results


  • psychopaths used more subordinating conjunctions than non-psychopaths. this suggests a more causal view
  • psychopaths take more about basic needs and less about higher level, emotional needs
  • psychopaths tended to use less pleasant and less intense emotional words, as well as using significantly more disfluencies in their speech
• conclusion


  • the language that psychopaths use to describe emotional events (like their crimes) is different from non-psychopaths. they seem to operate on a lower emotional level