Language Patterns of Psychopaths


Michael Stuart Kelly

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Language Patterns of Psychopaths

I just watched a talk by Jeff Hancock and (on the phone) Michael Woodworth about their studies on the language patterns of incarcerated psychopathic criminals who have committed murder.

My purpose was to help flesh out believable villains for my fiction writing, specifically their dialogue.

I learned all kinds of interesting things like psychopaths talk about their food a lot (or other lower-level values similar to ones on the Maslow pyramid) when discussing the murders they committed.

I found this talk eerily disturbing. I didn't expect to, but it surprised me.



I guess I have lost my innocence. I have known people like that!

How I long for the days when villain to me meant your garden variety megalomaniacal bad guy like a James Bond evildoer. Ah... for the days when all they wanted to do was take over the earth. :smile:

Here, for future reference (if anyone else is doing villain profiles), is an entry on Hare's revised Psychopathy Checklist from the Wikipedia article: Psychopathy.

Psychopathy Checklist-Revised: Factors, Facets, and Items

Factor 1

Facet 1: Interpersonal

-- Glibness/superficial charm
-- Grandiose sense of self-worth
-- Pathological lying
-- Conning/manipulative

Facet 2: Affective

-- Lack of remorse or guilt
-- Emotionally shallow
-- Callous/lack of empathy
-- Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

Factor 2

Facet 3: Lifestyle

-- Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
-- Parasitic lifestyle
-- Lack of realistic, long-term goals
-- Impulsivity
-- Irresponsibility

Facet 4: Antisocial
-- Poor behavioral controls
-- Early behavioral problems
-- Juvenile delinquency
-- Revocation of conditional release
-- Criminal versatility

Other items

-- Many short-term marital relationships
-- Promiscuous sexual behavior

Oh God...

It gets worse.

That sounds like me!

:)

(If anyone sees Kat, tell her I'm joking. :) )

Michael

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I'm currently reading The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers can Teach Us About Success, so this post fits snugly with my readings.

I've also taken a self-diagnostic psychopathy test. I scored 2.9 out of 5.0 (0.1 being the least psychopathic and 5.0 being the most psychopathic). I suspect my score might be higher since some of the questions were a bit confusing, or the potential answers were ambiguous.

Michael, would you like to see my new knife I recently ordered off Amazon.com?

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Here's the online article that prompted the video if anyone is interested.

Hungry like the wolf: A word-pattern analysis of the language of psychopaths
by Jeffrey T. Hancock, Michael T. Woodworth and Stephen Porter

If you get into a scientific frame of reading mind, it's a cool read.

Here's a quote from the end:

In summary, our analysis of the language of psychopaths suggests that they describe powerful emotional events (their crimes) in an idiosyncratic manner. Relative to those of other individuals, their narratives contain more cause and effect statements, more references to primitive physiological needs, are less emotional and less positive, show an emotional detachment in terms of a higher use of the past tense, and reveal high rates of disfluencies indicating that the task is cognitively challenging. Overall, these findings on speech begin to open the window into the mind of the psychopath, allowing us to infer that the psychopath's world view is fundamentally different from the rest of the human species. Such stylistic differences, likely beyond conscious control, support views that psychopaths operate on a primitive but rational level.


Michael

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