Tuesday, 28 November 2017

Hancock's language of psychopaths study (2011)



Context/background

Psychopaths are individuals with a distinct combo of cognitive, social and emotional characteristics, with a reduced capacity for moral responsibilities because of a biological difference, they are 1% of the population and often very successful

Language provides an insight into underlying emotions and cognitions, e.g. "um" and "ah", how coloured we speak and uses of tense = reveal personality traits

Patterns identified from language have identified disorders in depression and paranoia

Porter = psychopaths are x2.5 more likely to be successful in parole because of being more manipulative


Aim

To test how crime narratives differ between psychopaths and non psychopaths with murder crimes


Method

Semi- structured interviews (self report)

Step-wise interview = encourages individual's version of events, less prompting the better and interviewer must be alert to differences in language and memory

Hierarchy of needs = basic types of motivation in orders = basic physical needs, safety, love, esteem and self actualisation 


Procedure

Sample- 52 male murderers, 14 psychopaths, 38 normals, all canadian and a volunteer sample, 16% did 1st degree murder, 64% did second degree murder, and 20% did manslaughter, the mean age at time of crime was 28.9 (14-50)

Psycho assessment- Potential p's asked if they would like to be a study, interested ones went to an assessment, psychopathy measured using a psychology checklist revised (PCR), characterised b 20 criteria scored 0-2, max. score = 40, clinical diagnostic cut off for psychopaths was 30 or kore

Conducted by trained prison psychologists were well trained in PCR
14 offenders classified as psychopathic, 38 were non psychopathic

P's were interviewed, and the purpose of the study and procedure was briefed to them
Audio taped, they described their offences in detail and were encouraged to omit no details (stepwise method)

The interviewers were 2 senior psychology graduates and 1 research assistant, blind to the psychopathy scores, and the interviews lasted 25 minutes

The narratives were checked and analysed with WMatrix (a corpus analysis programme) to analyse semantic concepts and DAL (dictionary of affect in language to examine affective tone of the words)

There was no significant difference in number of words in interviews between groups
Psychopaths used more subordinate conjunctions e.g. since, as, so that
Psychopaths used twice as many words related to physiological needs, the normal group mentioned social needs way more

Psychopaths used more past tense, e.g. stabbed, and used fewer present tense, higher rate of articles such as concrete nouns, psychopathic language is less fluent, no difference between emotional content between groups, but psychopaths = less positive or emotionally intense language


Conclusions

Psychopaths were x7 more likely than non-psychos to describe cause + effect when describing murder

They're more likely to view crime as a logical outcome

They focus on the physiological needs, not so much social 

Lower levels on the hierarchy

Psychopaths use more past tense = more distant and less emotional descriptions, they operate their thoughts on a primitive and rational level


Evaluation

Method- self report, less detail but less data per participant

Data type- large amount of qual. = rich in language but a bit too detailed and varied for direct comparison

Ethics- privacy and confidentiality maintained and consent was gained, p's were also briefed

Validity- good ecological validity, because it was about their own crimes, social desirability may have been a factor

Sample- unrepresentative and ethnocentric, also volunteer bias

Reliability- replicable, high inter rater reliability
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