Hancock

• The Hare psychopathy checklist is used to diagnose people who may exhibit the characteristics of psychopathy. A psychopath is a person who takes advantage of others using charm, deceit and violence. They lack empathy.
• Patrick found that psychopaths show no deficits in intelligence but their language is less coherent than non-psychopaths. This was supported with research by Cleckley that found psychopaths were more likely to go off on tangents and be incoherent.
• Hancock study wanted to extend previous work to see if language of psychopathic murderers is different from non psychopath murderers.
• Hancock aimed to examine whether the language of psychopathic murderers was different to non-psychopathic murderers, through examination of a predatory world view, type of needs, and poverty of affect.
• Hancock studied 52 male murderers in Canadian prisons, 14 were psychopaths. They had all admitted to their crimes and volunteered for the study.
• A self report method was used through a semi structured interview that employed the step-wise interview technique to gather data about their language.
• Psychopathy was measured using the Psychopathy Checklist - Revised (PCL-R) and used a cut off score of 25 to classify psychopaths.
• Procedure:

  • Participants were briefed on the aims and procedure of the study and asked to describe their homicide offence in as much detail as possible - leaving out no details,
  • The interviewers were 2 senior psychology graduate students and one research assistant who were blind to if the participants were a psychopath,
  • Each interview was transcribed and analysed using the Wmatrix (analyse use of word types like verbs etc.) and the DAL (Dictionary of Affect in Language to examine emotional properties of language).
• Findings:

  • Psychopaths used more words implying cause and effect - almost justifying their crimes,
  • Psychopaths used twice as many words about basic physiological needs and significantly fewer words about social needs (like family and religion),
  • Psychopaths used more past tense verbs (showing psychological distance from their crime) and showed more disfluencies (e.g. erm) as thought making a good impression and emotion does not come naturally.
• Conclusions:

  • Psychopaths are more likely to view their crime as a logical outcome of events,
  • Psychopaths focus more on physiological needs,
  • Psychopaths are less emotional and less fluent in their speech.