Hancock

Question 1

aim/hypothesis

Answer 1

psychopaths would produce fewer and less intense emotional words, more disfluencies

Question 2

sample

Answer 2

52 male murderers (14 psychopaths, 38 non)

form Canadian prisons, all admitted to crimes

Question 3

how were p’s obtained

Answer 3

volunteered for study

Question 4

stage 1

Answer 4

PCL-R widely used tool for psychopathy

out of 40, assess against affective, anti social lifestyle (conducted by trained prison psychologists)

Question 5

stage 2

Answer 5

interview with p’s, purpose explained, p’s asked to describe their homocide offence in lots of detail, audiotaped (about 25 mins)

Question 6

stage 3

Answer 6

Wmatrix - corpus analysis
speech from 14 psychopaths analysed as one
DAL (dictionary based) - assess emotional language, score given for intensity

Question 7

findings

Answer 7

no significant difference between no.b emotional words used, psychopaths used 33% more disfluencies (uh,um)

Question 8

ethical guidelines

Answer 8

fairly ethical, little harm

Question 9

link to area

Answer 9

how psychopaths differ from other criminals in terms of language

Question 10

link to key theme (measuring differences)

Answer 10

computer analysis could be used to analyse differences in features of language