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