hancock

• background

  • psychopaths are described as people who are selfish and profound emotional deficit
  • Neuroimaging research suggests that there are structural abnormalities, including reduced activity in the amygdala.
  • Williamson found out that psychopaths use more logically inconsistent statements than non-psychopaths. 
• aim - to examine the language characteristics of psychopaths when describing their violent crimes, considering: their emotional deficits, use of socioemotional set of needs and a predatory world view
• method

  • quasi
  • semi structured interview using the step wise technique
• sample

  • 52 males in Canadian prison for murder
  • volunteer sampling
• procedure

  1. assessed who would be classified as a psychopath using PCL-R
  2. to check reliability 10 case files were recorded and high inter rater found
  3. ps were told the interview was to examine the manner in which homicide offenders recall their homicide offence,
  4. the interviewer was blind to the result of the psychopathy results and asked free recall of the murder
• tools used to measure the language

  • WMATRIX - measured the use of nouns, verbs and adjectives in psychopaths and non
  • DAL (dictionary affect in language )- asses the emotional properties e.g, how intense were they
• results

  • psychopaths produced more suborindary functions than non and were more likely to refer to cause and effect relationships
  • psychopaths used more words connected to basic physiological needs than non
  • psychopaths used more past tense verbs and more disfluencies suggesting language is not as fluent
• conclusions

  • psychopaths have a fundamentally different world view from others as they live more in the past and cannot form as sentence as easily
  • they operate on a more primitive and rational level
• strengths

  • step wise technique is very standardised
  • qualitative intially gathered but converted to quantitative which can be analysed
• weaknesses

  • reduced validity as criteria lowered for a psychopath than it is usally
  • ethnocentric
  • androcentric
• relate to key theme - measuring differences

  • psychopaths used more past tense verbs ad included more disfluencies when describing their murder, suggesting we can quantify how to classify someone as a psychopath
• relate to area

  assumption - characteristics can be measured and quantified

  the wmatrix can be used to analyse speech ad quantify the number of nouns, can be compared to a non psychopath
• similarities with Gould

  • androcentric samples
  • both quasi experiments
  • both used self report
• differences with Gould

  • Gould = opportunity sampling, Hancock = volunteer
  • differing levels of control