Individual differences area: Hancock

Question 1

What is a psychopath?

Answer 1

Someone who exhibits a wholly selfish orientation and profound emotional deficit (e.g. no empathy)

Question 2

What was the PCL-R?

Answer 2

The psychopath checklist revised

Question 3

What is hypothesis 1 of Hancock’s study? (instrumental language analysis)

Answer 3

Psychopaths will use more subordinating conjunctions

Question 4

Explain hypothesis 1 (psychopaths use more subordinating conjunctions)

Answer 4

These words are associated with cause and effect statements and would suggest their crimes are pre-meditated and motivated by achieving an end goal

Question 5

What is hypothesis 2 of Hancock’s study? (hierarchy or needs)

Answer 5

Psychopaths will use more references towards physiological and material needs such as food, drink, clothing

Question 6

Explain hypothesis 2 (psychopaths reference more material needs)

Answer 6

Satisfying their basic physiological and material needs matter more than satisfying higher level needs (love, family)

Question 7

What is hypothesis 3 of Hancock’s study? (emotional expression in language)

Answer 7

Psychopaths would produce fewer and less intense emotional words, more disfluencies and use language that reflects psychological ‘distancing’

Question 8

Give some examples of disfluencies in speech

Answer 8

‘Um’, ‘Uh’

Question 9

Explain hypothesis 3 (psychopaths produce fewer emotional words, more disfluencies, and language reflecting psychological ‘distancing’)

Answer 9

Psychopaths have a deficit in their ability to experience emotions themselves and to recognise the emotions that others feel and have an increased cognitive load trying to describe what had happened in an appropriate manner

Question 10

What was the research method used in Hancock’s study?

Answer 10

Quasi experiment

Question 11

Give evidence to justify that Hancock’s study was a quasi experiment

Answer 11

IV - whether someone was a psychopath or not

DV - language characteristics of psychopath language

Question 12

Describe the sample in Hancock’s study

Answer 12

52 males in prison in Canada for murder, all of whom had admitted to their crime

Question 13

What was the mean age of imprisonment?

Answer 13

28.9 years

Question 14

What was stage 1 of Hancock’s procedure?

Answer 14

Assessing the participants levels of psychopathy

Question 15

How was psychopathy measured in the study?

Answer 15

Using the PCL-R

Question 16

How does the PCL-R measure psychopathy?

Answer 16

By rating 20 criteria on a scale of 0-2 (max score 40)

Question 17

What score will someone receive a clinical diagnosis of psychopathy from the PCL-R?

Answer 17

30 or above

Question 18

What was an acceptable score for psychopathy for research?

Answer 18

25 or above

Question 19

For 39 of the men, who conducted their PCL-R?

Answer 19

Trained prison psychologists

Question 20

For the other 13 men, who conducted their PCL-R?

Answer 20

A trained researcher because assessments were not available in their prison files

Question 21

How was inter-rater reliability checked between the 2 raters and what was the correlation co-efficient for the IRR?

Answer 21

By re-coding 10 randomly picked case files

=.94

Question 22

What was stage 2 of Hancock’s study?

Answer 22

Interviews with the participants

Question 23

How long did the interviews last for?

Answer 23

25 minutes

Question 24

Who conducted the interviews?

Answer 24

2 senior psychology graduates and one research student who were all completely blind to psychopathy scores

Question 25

What were P’s asked in their interviews?

Answer 25

To describe their homicide offence in as much detail as possible

Question 26

What was stage 3 of Hancock’s study?

Answer 26

Analysis of transcripts from the interviews

Question 27

What was used to analyse the transcripts?

Answer 27

Wmatrix and Dictionary of Affect in Language (DAL)

Question 28

How did the wmatrix analyse speech?

Answer 28

The body of speech was brought together and analysed as one

Question 29

What did the wmatrix do to compare the speech?

Answer 29

It tags part of speech into their categories (noun, verb, adjective) - uses context to help

Question 30

What did the DAL analyse?

Answer 30

The software analysed the emotional properties of language

Question 31

What were the emotional properties of language from the analysis using the DAL?

Answer 31

Positive v Negative
Low v High intensity
Low v High imagery

Question 32

What was scored from the DAL?

Answer 32

Pleasantness and intensity of emotional language for each P’s statement

Question 33

How was hypothesis 1 supported by the findings? (instrumental language analysis)

Answer 33

Psychopaths produced significantly more subordinating conjunctions than the non psychopaths

Question 34

What percentage of the words used by psychopaths were subordinating conjunctions (vs non psychopaths)?

Answer 34

1.82% (psychopaths) vs 1.54% (non-psychopaths)

Question 35

How was hypothesis 2 supported supported by the findings? (hierarchy of needs analysis)

Answer 35

Psychopaths used significantly more words connected to physiological needs than the the non psychopaths who used more words connected to social needs

Question 36

How was hypothesis 3 supported by the findings in terms of emotional content?

Answer 36

DAL scores revealed no differences between the two groups however it was found there was a negative correlation between emotional content and factor 1 scores from the PCL-R

Question 37

What was factor 1 of the PCL-R?

Answer 37

The part which assesses interpersonal and affective deficits

Question 38

How was hypothesis 3 supported by the findings in terms of disfluencies?

Answer 38

Speech produced by psychopaths contained 33% more disfluencies than non psychopaths

Question 39

How was hypothesis 3 supported by the findings in terms of psychological distancing?

Answer 39

Psychopaths used a significantly higher percentage of verbs in the past tense and non psychopaths used a significantly higher percentage of verbs in present tense

Question 40

Which ethical guidelines did Hancock uphold?

Answer 40

No deception, consent, confidentiality

Question 41

Which ethical guidelines may have been breached by Hancock?

Answer 41

No mention of withdrawal

Question 42

How did Hancock obtain his sample?

Answer 42

They volunteered

Question 43

Were the procedures controlled, standardised and replicable? (internal reliability)

Answer 43

Same interview procedure and computer program to analyse language would’ve resulted in consistency

Question 44

Does this study succeed in telling us about psychopaths’ use of language? (internal validity)

Answer 44

Not necessarily as they were only asking to give accounts of their murder and may have been testing their levels of education/intellect

Question 45

Can the sample be generalised from? (external validity)

Answer 45

The sample of non-psychopaths was quite small so we can’t generalise the findings to all people and also all criminals

Question 46

Was the sample large enough to suggest a consistent effect? (external reliability)

Answer 46

Yes in terms of people convicted of homicide but not for all psychopaths and non psychopaths

Question 47

What was the ratio of psychopaths to non-psychopaths?

Answer 47

14:38