Hancock Flashcards
1
Q
What was Hancock looking at?
A
- Language of psychopaths
2
Q
What are the ‘traits of a psychopath’?
A
- 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
3
Q
What did research show about language?
A
- 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
4
Q
How were psychopaths portrayed in the media?
A
- Individuals who exhibit abnormally high levels of selfishness and seemingly lack a conscience
- Skilled conversationalists, verbally gifted in their ability to lie and manipulate
5
Q
What did Porter et al find?
A
- That psychopathic offenders in the Canadian penal system were approx. 2.5x more likely than non-psychopaths to be successful in their parole applications
6
Q
What was Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?
A
- 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)
7
Q
What were the aims?
A
- 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)
8
Q
What were the research methods?
A
- Quasi experiment
- Independent measures design
- Semi-structured interviews
9
Q
What were the IV’s?
A
- Psychopath, not psychopath
10
Q
What was the DV?
A
- Measures of language from the test analysis
11
Q
What was the sample?
A
- 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
12
Q
What were the materials for the Assessment of Psychopathy?
A
- 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
13
Q
What were the materials for the text analysis?
A
- 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
14
Q
What was the procedure for the PCL-R?
A
- Completed by trained prison psychologists
- Inter-rater reliability was gained by having trained graduate students recode 10 randomly selected case files
15
Q
What was the procedure for the interviews?
A
- 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
