Can you tell psychopaths by the way they speak?

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I came across the below article this morning whilst I was looking up a word in

the thesaurus. It is worth going to the link and reading some of the comments.

Some are funny, however one was interesting, the person who commented about the

Myer Briggs type indicator. Was interesting to me because I've started reading a

book about the Myer Briggs indicator.

Regarding the article though and the mention of " Defined by psychologists, a

psychopath is someone who does not forge the emotional bonds that normal people

do and do not empathize with others. " I've heard similar, if not the same said

about those with Asperger's, not that I agree with such. Not so keen on the word

'normal' either, but that's just me - when you get right down to it, what is

'normal' anyway?

Also; " The real world application of these conclusions may seem far fetched, but

police departments and investigators hope to use craigslist or facebook posts to

determine psychological profiles of suspects or potential criminals. "

Kind of glad I not on facebook, would be worrying if I used the wrong words

might end up accidently labelled a psychopath (sigh).

http://hotword.dictionary.com/psychopaths/?fb_ref=hotword_activity

Can you tell psychopaths by the way they speak?

October 27, 2011 236 Comments Share Have you ever met someone and thought they

were a little off? Just by the way someone speaks, we can pick up on social cues

and emotional intelligence that give us certain impressions about them.

Communications researchers have taken this hunch to another level. They

interviewed convicted murderers whose self-reported tests reveal them to be

psychopaths and analyzed the specific language usage of their speech patterns.

The research was led by Hancock, a communications professor at Cornell

University, whose work focuses on two types of language phenomenon in

particular: verbal irony and deception. Hancock and his team observed multiple

specific abnormal speech patterns in the psychopaths they interviewed.

Defined by psychologists, a psychopath is someone who does not forge the

emotional bonds that normal people do and do not empathize with others. They

tend to see people as means to their own ends, rather than as individuals. These

emotional abnormalities manifest in their speech patterns in a few interesting

ways. The psychopaths who were interviewed tended to use a lot of causal phrases

like " so " and " because. " The researchers interpreted this to mean that they were

explaining their crimes away as a " logical outcome of a plan (something that

`had' to be done to achieve a goal).' " In contrast, other convicted criminals

who are not psychopaths tend to use more language around religion and their own

guilt when describing their crime. The researchers observed other aberrations in

psychopaths' speech. Psychopaths in the study spoke of basic needs like food and

money twice as much as the other subjects in the study, and they also use more

disfluencies (phrases like " uh " or " umm " ) to break up their speech. Learn more

about disfluencies here.

The real world application of these conclusions may seem far fetched, but police

departments and investigators hope to use craigslist or facebook posts to

determine psychological profiles of suspects or potential criminals.

What do you think about linguistic profiles of criminals?

Author: Hot Word | Posted in Uncategorized