I - Hancock Flashcards
Background
• A computerised analysis by Junghaenel, Smyth & Santner (2008) of language produced by psychiatric patients revealed fewer words pertaining to optimism, basic cognitive functions, references to the future, and communication with others compared to a sample of community volunteers.
• There has been little examination of the speech associated with psychopaths (Hare, 1993) who comprise about 1% of the general population (Hare, 2006).
• Hare (2003) found that studies of psychophysiology, neurology, and behaviour have shown psychopaths to exhibit a wholly selfish orientation and profound emotional deficit.
• Researchers such as Raine et al (2003, 2004) and Oliveria-Souza et al (2008), have found that the psychopath’s diminished capability for neural sensibility appears to have biological underpinnings.
• Patrick (2006) found psychopaths exhibit no apparent deficits in intellect.
• Previous studies have revealed that psychopaths’ language appears to be less cohesive than non-psychopaths:
- Cleckley (1976) observed, through case studies, that the discourse of psychopaths was more likely to include a tangential and incoherent quality than non-psychopaths.
- Williamson (1993) analysed the narratives of psychopaths and non-psychopaths and found that the former used more contradictory, logically inconsistent statements.
- Similarly, Brinkley, Newman, Harper& Johnson (1999) found that narratives of psychopaths contained fewer cohesive ties and more integrated details than non-psychopaths.
• This study was the first to uniquely examine the specific qualities of psychopathic language using sophisticated statistical text analysis tools. The researchers examined the language characteristics of psychopaths (in describing their violent crimes) on three major characteristics:
(i) Their instrumental nature.
(ii) Their unique material and socioemotional needs. (iii)Their emotional deficit.
(The expectations of Hancock et al in relation to these three characteristics can be found in the original study.)
• Their aim was to examine whether the language of psychopaths reflected, as predicted, an instrumental/predatory world view, unique socioemotional needs and a poverty of effect.
Aim
Their aim was to examine whether the language of psychopaths reflected, as predicted, an instrumental/predatory world view, unique socioemotional needs and a poverty of effect
Method/Design
• Psychopathy was measured using Pschopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991, 2003).
• This study used semi-structured/open-ended interviews (a SELF-REPORT method) which employed the Step-Wise Interview technique to gather data in relation to the language of psychopaths and non-psychopaths who had committed murder.
• The narratives were subsequently transcribed and analysed through content analysis using the Wmatrix and the DAL.
Sample
• 52 male murders (14 psychopathic, 38 non-psychopathic) incarcerated in Canadian correctional facilities who admitted their crime and volunteered for the study.
• 8 convictions (16%) were for first-degree murder, 32 (64%) of convictions were for second-degree murder and 10 (20%) of convictions were for manslaughter.
• There were no differences between the type of crime (manslaughter, second-degree murder, first-degree murder) and psychopathy versus control (non-psychopathy).
• Mean age at the time of their current homicide was 28.9 years (SD = 9.2, range of 14-50 years).
• The two groups did not differ on age (psychopaths: M = 39.71 years, SD = 7.53; controls: M = 39.91 years, SD = 9.76, t(50) = .06, ns.
• The two groups did not differ in the amount of time since the homicide was committed (psychopaths: M = 11.87 years, SD = 7.78; controls: M = 9.82, SD = 6.78, t(50) = .93, ns.
Procedure
• Firstly, potential participants were asked whether they would be interested in taking part in a research study.
• Interested individuals underwent a psychopathy assessment:
- Psychopathy was measured using the Psychology Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). Psychopathy, as measured by the PCL-R is characterised by 20 criteria scored from 0 – 2 for a maximum score of 40. The clinical diagnostic cut-off for psychopathy is scores of 30 or above. (Further details of this can be found in the original study.)
- The PCL–R assessments were either conducted by extensively trained prison psychologists or a researcher who was well trained in the coding of the PCL–R (an inter-rater reliability check showed a significant positive correlation with p ≤ .001).
- Using a cut-off score of 25 (which had previously been justified for research purposes e.g. Jackson, Rogers, Neumann & Lambert, 2002), 14 offenders were classified as psychopathic and 38 as non-psychopathic.
• Participants were then interviewed. At the beginning of the interview, the purpose of the study (to examine the manner in which homicide offenders recall their homicide offence) and the procedure were verbally explained.
• While being audio-taped, participants were asked to describe their homicide offences in as much detail as possible. In this open-ended interviewing procedure, each participant was encouraged to provide as much information about the crime as possible from the beginning to the end, omitting no details. Participants were prompted to provide to do this using a standardised procedure known as the Step-Wise Interview (see Yuille, Marxson & Cooper, 1999).
• The interviewers were two senior psychology graduate students and one research assistant, all of whom were blind to the psychopathy scores of the offenders.
• Interviews lasted about 25 minutes.
• The narratives were subsequently transcribed, as close to verbatim as possible and then checked to ensure spelling errors were corrected, all interviewer comments were deleted and proper nouns and abbreviations were spelled out.
• Two text analysis tools were then used to analyse the transcripts:
(i) The corpus analysis programme Wmatrix (Rayson, 2003, 2008), which was used to compare parts of speech and to analyse semantic concepts contained in the psychopath and control corpora.
(ii) The Dictionary of Affect in Language (DAL) software programme (Whissell & Dewson, 1986) was used to examine the affective tone of the words.
(Details of these text analysis tools can be found in the original study.)
Results
• The interviews of the psychopaths and controls produced a total of 1,27,376 words. The 14 psychopath narratives contained 29,562 words and averaged 2,201.5 (SE = 408.1) per participant. The 38 control narratives contained 97,814 words and averaged 2,554.3 (SE = 367.0) per participants. There was no significant difference in the average number of words produced by psychopaths and controls, t(50) = .59, ns.
Instrumental language analysis
- Psychopaths produced more subordinating conjunctions than controls e.g. because, since, as, so that.
Hierarchy of needs analysis
- Psychopaths used approximately twice as many words related to basic physiological needs, including eating, drinking and monetary resources when describing their murders than controls.
- Controls used significantly more language related to social needs, including family, religion and spirituality than psychopaths.
Semantic content of homicide descriptions, related to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs across psychopathic and non-psychopathic offenders
Emotional expression of language
- The degree to which the psychopaths had physiologically distanced themselves/were simply detached from their homicide was examined through the use of the past and present form of verbs and the rate of articles:
- Psychopaths used more past tense verbs than controls e.g. stabbed.
- Psychopaths used fewer present tense verbs than controls e.g. stab.
- Psychopaths produced a higher rate of articles than controls, revealing that their language involved more concrete nouns.
• Psychopathic language was significantly less fluent than controls.
• Initially, no significant differences in the emotional content of language between the two groups in terms of pleasantness, intensity or imagery were found. However further analysis showed psychopathy to be associated with less positively valenced and less emotionally intense language.
Conclusions
• Psychopaths are more likely than non-psychopaths to describe cause and effect relationships when describing their murder.
• Psychopaths are more likely to view their crime as a logical outcome of a plan than non-psychopaths.
• Psychopaths focus more on physiological needs than higher level social needs than non-psychopaths.
• Psychopaths are focused on a lower level of necessities in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs than non-psychopaths.
• Psychopaths will linguistically frame their homicide as more in the past and in more psychologically distant terms than non-psychopaths.
• Psychopaths give less emotionally intense descriptions of their crimes and use less emotionally pleasant language than non-psychopaths.
• Psychopathic language is substantially more disfluent than that of non-psychopaths.
• Psychopaths describe powerful emotional events (their crimes) in an idiosyncratic manner.
• Psychopaths operate on a primitive but rational level.
Method Evaluation
This study used a number of different methods. It was quasi-experimental as the participants being psychopaths was clearly not manipulated; therefore, natural behaviour is being studied. A semi structured interview was conducted, and prompts were used. This allowed rich, detailed qualitative data to be gained.
However, comparisons may have been difficult as different aspects of the crimes may have been described in different amounts of detail by participants.
Also, a content analysis was used to analyse the data. The interpretation may be biased and certain trends may not have been reported.
Data
Quantitative data
Each interview was transcribed and analysed after to produce quantitative data to allow comparisons to be made between psychopaths and non psychopaths use of language.
Qualitative data
The semi-structured interviews gained lots of qualitative data from individual recordings so lots of rich detail about the language used
Ethics
As the participants were volunteers, they clearly gave their consent to take part and were told the aims and the procedures of the interview.
The study was confidential as participants remained unidentified
However, it isn’t clear whether this consent was fully informed: they may not have been aware they were being assessed on psychopathy or being compared to another group.
Reliability
The study was reliable as the procedure was capable of replication and so was linguistic analysis due to the WMATRIX and the DAL programmes used
Inter rater reliability for the study was high in relation to the coding of PCL-R (psychopathy checklist) and also the interviews are followed the same step wise procedure therefore making it both consistent and replicable.
However the open-ended nature of the interview could lead to variability in terms of detail provided on key parts of their crime.
Validity
Internal validity was increased as the participants were not told the exact aims of the interview and the interviewers were not aware which murderers were psychopaths, resulting in no interviewer bias (double blind procedure)
It has good ecological validity as participants interviewed about own crimes which they provide detailed accounts about
High concurrent validity as it uses previously established tests which are highly valid measures used to determine psychopathy (PCL- R) and linguistic analysis tools (Wmatrix and DAL) tested for validity and used in other research providing concurrent validity
However, questions have been asked about the validity of the classification of psychopaths. A lower score than normal on the test was used to classify psychopathy which may have confounded the results. (The usual score was 30/40 and they lowered it to 25)
Also some participants interviewed nearly a decade after their crime so how accurate were their responses
Social desirability may affect how participants responded to Psychopathy checklist.
Assessing language using quantitative data may lack construct validity.
Sample
It was a large sample so lots of data for statistical analysis
Androcentric - all participants are male so can’t generalise to women
Self-select – it was a volunteer sample so it won’t represent the prisoners who did not volunteer
Findings may lack population validity due to cultural bias only based on a Canadian correctional facility.
Ethnocentrism
The study was ethnocentric as it was all male Canadian prisoners
