Hancock Et Al

Question 1

What year was Hancock et Al’s study?

Answer 1

2011

Question 2

What are traits of psychopaths?

Answer 2

~ Often come across as charming, intelligent and articulate
~ Lack empathy
~ See other people as there to be used in order to achieve their own goals
~ Are extremely self-centred and manipulative

Question 3

What is psychopathy seen as?

Answer 3

A personality disorder not a mental illness

Question 4

Explain the way to test for psychopathy:

Answer 4

Robert Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist (Revised) on them
~ Contains 20 items, with each item being scored from 0-2 (0 = doesn’t apply; 1 = applies somewhat; 2 = applies fully)
~ Eight ‘Factor 1’ items that relate to interpersonal traits (e.g. inflated sense of self-worth; cunning/manipulative; lack of remorse or guilt)
~ Twelve ‘Factor 2’ items that relate to anti-social ways of behaving (e.g. juvenile delinquency; poor behavioural control; promiscuity)
~ A score of 30 or above is required to be classed as psychopathic

Question 5

What was the aim of Hancock et Al’s study?

Answer 5

To investigate whether psychopaths use language in ways that are different from how non-psychopaths use language such that it might be possible to detect psychopathy from how a person speaks

Question 6

What are the characteristics of Hancock et Al’s sample?

Answer 6

~ 52 males held in prison in Canada for murder

~ 14 were classed as psychopathic

~ A score of 25 on the PCL-R was accepted to classify a participant as psychopathic

~ 38 were classed as non-psychopathic

Question 7

What was the procedure of Hancock et Al’s study?

Answer 7

~ All of the participants were interviewed individually
~ Asked to describe what happened during the murder that had led to them being convicted
~ Interviews interviews all followed the ‘Step-Wise’ approach
~ Interviews were typed up as transcripts
~ Everything prisoners said was typed up including dysfluencies such as “um” and “ah” and ungrammatical uses of language
~ Transcripts were then subjected to two forms of computer-based analysis

Question 8

What were the two forms of computer based analysis in Hancock et Al’s study and what did they do?

Answer 8

Wmatrix – a program that analysed all the psychopath transcripts and compared this against the all the non-psychopath transcripts
It analysed the words used, as well as tense, etc

DAL (Dictionary of Affect in Language) – this was applied to each transcript individually, assessing the pleasantness and intensity of emotional language used

Question 9

Did psychopaths use more or less subordinating clauses than a normal person?

Answer 9

More

Question 10

What does psychopaths using more subordinating conjunctions suggest?

Answer 10

Their murders were premeditated acts aimed at achieving specific goals

Question 11

What did Hancock et al identify about hierarchy of needs?

Answer 11

The psychopaths used more words associated with satisfying low-level physiological and material needs (e.g. for food, shelter, or sex)

The non-psychopaths used more words relating to higher-level emotional or spiritual needs (e.g. to do with family or religion)

Question 12

What did Hancock notice about psychopaths relating to their emotional expression?

Answer 12

~ Dysfluencies – their speech contained 33% more ‘um’ and ‘ah’ phrases
~ Reflects the effort they were having to put in to come across positively to the interviewer

~ Psychological distancing – they used more words in the past tense (e.g. ‘stabbed’, rather than ‘stab’) and more articles (e.g. ‘the’, rather than ‘my’)
~ Suggests a distancing of themselves from the murder they had committed

~ Emotional content of language – the higher a person’s ‘Factor 1’ score had been on the PCL-R, the lower they scored for pleasantness and intensity of emotional language
~There was a negative correlation between these co-variables)