Hancock

Question 1

What was Hancock looking at?

Answer 1

• Language of psychopaths

Question 2

What are the ‘traits of a psychopath’?

Answer 2

• Extreme egocentricity
• Inability to establish meaningful personal relationships
• Lack of remorse/conscience
• Failure to learn from experience
• Narcissistic, manipulative, impulsive, aggressive
• Callous disregard for others

Question 3

What did research show about language?

Answer 3

• Can provide useful insight into underlying cognitive and emotional processes
• Many of the new ways we express ourselves are unconscious and automatic
• Features of language such as disfluencies, how emotionally coloured our speech is, and use of past/present tense can reveal a lot about people’s personalities

Question 4

How were psychopaths portrayed in the media?

Answer 4

• Individuals who exhibit abnormally high levels of selfishness and seemingly lack a conscience
• Skilled conversationalists, verbally gifted in their ability to lie and manipulate

Question 5

What did Porter et al find?

Answer 5

• That psychopathic offenders in the Canadian penal system were approx. 2.5x more likely than non-psychopaths to be successful in their parole applications

Question 6

What was Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?

Answer 6

• Humanism
• Self actualisation (ability to reach true potential)
• Esteem (respect, self-esteem, recognition)
• Love and belonging (friendship, family)
• Safety needs (personal security, employment)
• Physiological needs (air, water, food)

Question 7

What were the aims?

Answer 7

• To use text analysis to analyse language characteristics of psychopaths in describing their violent crimes. The focus was on 3 major characteristics:
  1. An instrumental/predatory world view (because, and, so, that)
  2. Unique socioemotional needs (little need for others, basic needs concerns, e.g., food/sex)
  3. Poverty of affect (lack of emotional intelligence, more disfluencies)

Question 8

What were the research methods?

Answer 8

• Quasi experiment
• Independent measures design
• Semi-structured interviews

Question 9

What were the IV’s?

Answer 9

• Psychopath, not psychopath

Question 10

What was the DV?

Answer 10

• Measures of language from the test analysis

Question 11

What was the sample?

Answer 11

• 52 makes murderers in Canadian correctional facilities, volunteered to take part. (14 psycho, 38 not), mean age was 28 years old.
• No difference in type of murder/terms of age and time

Question 12

What were the materials for the Assessment of Psychopathy?

Answer 12

• 20 criteria scored from 0-2, max score of 40
• Factor 1 - affective/interpersonal traits (lack of remorse)
• A score of 25+ would indicate psychopathy

Question 13

What were the materials for the text analysis?

Answer 13

• WMatrix - classify types of words
  —> compare parts of speech, classifies speech in relation to nouns, verbs, and semantic categories (meanings)
• Dictionary of affect - classify emotional content
  —> affect of tone of words, positive and negative use of language, high and low intensity of words

Question 14

What was the procedure for the PCL-R?

Answer 14

• Completed by trained prison psychologists
• Inter-rater reliability was gained by having trained graduate students recode 10 randomly selected case files

Question 15

What was the procedure for the interviews?

Answer 15

• All audiotaped
• Participants were told at the start the study was examine the manner in which homocide offenders recall their offence
• Stepwise technique - asked to describe offence from start to end
• Conducted by 2 senior psychology students and 1 research assistant —> blind to psychopathy scores, lasted 25 minutes, were transcribed
• Verbally briefed on aims and procedure at start

Question 16

What were the results for number of words?

Answer 16

• No significant difference in number of words by psychopath/not psychopath

Question 17

What were the results of instrumental language analysis?

Answer 17

• Psychopaths used more conjunctions
• Describing cause and effect relationships between events of murder

Question 18

What were the results of hierarchy of needs analysis?

Answer 18

• Twice as many basic needs words compared to non-psychopaths
• Non-psychopaths used more words related to higher social needs

Question 19

What were the results of emotional expression in language?

Answer 19

• Psychopaths used more last tense verbs, fewer present tense words.
• Psychopaths used more articles (the, it, etc.), and more concrete nouns
• No difference between DAL scores (emotional language)

Question 20

What were the results of disfluencies?

Answer 20

• Psychopaths were less fluent, more disfluencies than non-psychopaths