Hancock

• Background

  • Psychopathy is a personality disorder, rather than a mental illness - debate whether it is the same as ASPD which is clinical
  • Standard way of checking for psychopathy is for a specialist to complete Robert Hare's Psychopathy Checklist on them - PCL-R contains 20 items being scored on a scale of 0-2 - 8 factor 1 traits that relate to interpersonal traits e.g. inflated sense of self-worth and 12 factor 2 items
  • Score of 30 was needed for someone to be classed as a psychopath
• aim

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

  • 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
• conclusions

  • 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