Individual differences area: Hancock Flashcards
What is a psychopath?
Someone who exhibits a wholly selfish orientation and profound emotional deficit (e.g. no empathy)
What was the PCL-R?
The psychopath checklist revised
What is hypothesis 1 of Hancock’s study? (instrumental language analysis)
Psychopaths will use more subordinating conjunctions
Explain hypothesis 1 (psychopaths use more subordinating conjunctions)
These words are associated with cause and effect statements and would suggest their crimes are pre-meditated and motivated by achieving an end goal
What is hypothesis 2 of Hancock’s study? (hierarchy or needs)
Psychopaths will use more references towards physiological and material needs such as food, drink, clothing
Explain hypothesis 2 (psychopaths reference more material needs)
Satisfying their basic physiological and material needs matter more than satisfying higher level needs (love, family)
What is hypothesis 3 of Hancock’s study? (emotional expression in language)
Psychopaths would produce fewer and less intense emotional words, more disfluencies and use language that reflects psychological ‘distancing’
Give some examples of disfluencies in speech
‘Um’, ‘Uh’
Explain hypothesis 3 (psychopaths produce fewer emotional words, more disfluencies, and language reflecting psychological ‘distancing’)
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
What was the research method used in Hancock’s study?
Quasi experiment
Give evidence to justify that Hancock’s study was a quasi experiment
IV - whether someone was a psychopath or not
DV - language characteristics of psychopath language
Describe the sample in Hancock’s study
52 males in prison in Canada for murder, all of whom had admitted to their crime
What was the mean age of imprisonment?
28.9 years
What was stage 1 of Hancock’s procedure?
Assessing the participants levels of psychopathy
How was psychopathy measured in the study?
Using the PCL-R
How does the PCL-R measure psychopathy?
By rating 20 criteria on a scale of 0-2 (max score 40)
What score will someone receive a clinical diagnosis of psychopathy from the PCL-R?
30 or above
What was an acceptable score for psychopathy for research?
25 or above
For 39 of the men, who conducted their PCL-R?
Trained prison psychologists
For the other 13 men, who conducted their PCL-R?
A trained researcher because assessments were not available in their prison files
How was inter-rater reliability checked between the 2 raters and what was the correlation co-efficient for the IRR?
By re-coding 10 randomly picked case files
=.94
What was stage 2 of Hancock’s study?
Interviews with the participants
How long did the interviews last for?
25 minutes
Who conducted the interviews?
2 senior psychology graduates and one research student who were all completely blind to psychopathy scores
What were P’s asked in their interviews?
To describe their homicide offence in as much detail as possible
What was stage 3 of Hancock’s study?
Analysis of transcripts from the interviews
What was used to analyse the transcripts?
Wmatrix and Dictionary of Affect in Language (DAL)
How did the wmatrix analyse speech?
The body of speech was brought together and analysed as one
What did the wmatrix do to compare the speech?
It tags part of speech into their categories (noun, verb, adjective) - uses context to help
What did the DAL analyse?
The software analysed the emotional properties of language
What were the emotional properties of language from the analysis using the DAL?
Positive v Negative
Low v High intensity
Low v High imagery
What was scored from the DAL?
Pleasantness and intensity of emotional language for each P’s statement
How was hypothesis 1 supported by the findings? (instrumental language analysis)
Psychopaths produced significantly more subordinating conjunctions than the non psychopaths
What percentage of the words used by psychopaths were subordinating conjunctions (vs non psychopaths)?
1.82% (psychopaths) vs 1.54% (non-psychopaths)
How was hypothesis 2 supported supported by the findings? (hierarchy of needs analysis)
Psychopaths used significantly more words connected to physiological needs than the the non psychopaths who used more words connected to social needs
How was hypothesis 3 supported by the findings in terms of emotional content?
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
What was factor 1 of the PCL-R?
The part which assesses interpersonal and affective deficits
How was hypothesis 3 supported by the findings in terms of disfluencies?
Speech produced by psychopaths contained 33% more disfluencies than non psychopaths
How was hypothesis 3 supported by the findings in terms of psychological distancing?
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
Which ethical guidelines did Hancock uphold?
No deception, consent, confidentiality
Which ethical guidelines may have been breached by Hancock?
No mention of withdrawal
How did Hancock obtain his sample?
They volunteered
Were the procedures controlled, standardised and replicable? (internal reliability)
Same interview procedure and computer program to analyse language would’ve resulted in consistency
Does this study succeed in telling us about psychopaths’ use of language? (internal validity)
Not necessarily as they were only asking to give accounts of their murder and may have been testing their levels of education/intellect
Can the sample be generalised from? (external validity)
The sample of non-psychopaths was quite small so we can’t generalise the findings to all people and also all criminals
Was the sample large enough to suggest a consistent effect? (external reliability)
Yes in terms of people convicted of homicide but not for all psychopaths and non psychopaths
What was the ratio of psychopaths to non-psychopaths?
14:38
