Hancock

Question 1

Background

Answer 1

Psychopaths are believed to make up around 1% of the population. Psychopathy is considered a personality disorder that results in a lack of empathy and extreme self-centeredness with a strong tendency towards manipulation. The standard way for assessing psychopathy is Robert Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist (Revised)

Question 2

Key Terms

The PCL-R

Answer 2

The PCL-R contains 20 items that are scored from 0-2 (0=doesn’t apply, 1=applies somewhat, 2=applies fully). There are 8 ‘Factor 1’ items related to interpersonal traits and 12 ‘Factor 2’ items related to anti-social behaviour. A 30+ score is required to class someone as a psychopath

Question 3

Aim

Answer 3

To investigate whether psychopaths used language differently to non-psychopaths

Question 4

Sample

Answer 4

52 male prisoners in Canada who had admitted to murder. 14 scored 25+ on the PCL-R (standard cut-off for research) with a mean age of 39.71 years and a mean 11.87 years since the murder. The other 38 were classed as non-psychopaths and had a mean age of 39.91 years with a mean of 9.82 years since the murder

Question 5

Procedure

Answer 5

All participants were interviewed individually for 25 minutes by two senior graduates and one research assistant, who were all blind to the PCL-R score. The interviews followed the ‘step-wise’ approach and asked the participants to describe the murder. The transcripts (which included disfluencies and incorrect grammar) were subjected to Wmatrix (a program that compared the words used, tense, etc. of all psychopath transcripts to the non-psychopath transcripts) and DAL (a program that assessed the pleasantness and intensity of emotional language used in each individual transcript)

Question 6

Results

Answer 6

• Psychopaths used more subordinating conjunctions than controls
• Psychopaths talked more about basic needs (sex, food, shelter) and less about higher level needs (meaningful relationships, family, spirituality)
• Psychopaths tended to use less pleasant and less intense emotional words, as well as using significantly more disfluencies in their speech

Question 7

Conclusion

Answer 7

The language that psychopaths use to describe emotional events is different from non-psychopaths. They seem to operate on a lower emotional level