Do you speak like a Psychopath?

     Being able to speak and write emotionally and intellectually is seen as a skill as many people struggle with the concepts and theory of language, not because they lack the intelligence or emotion. However, psychopaths are taken out of this bracket due to the fact they are labelled to have low emotional capability, therefore it seems that from a linguistic analysis point of view surely there may be different patterns between a non-psychopaths linguistics to a psychopaths. For instance, research has shown that someone who is a narcissist will use personal pronouns much more within their speech, such as , 'I' and 'me', due to the primary concern they have with themselves. This kind of research shows that your linguistic choices could potentially show personality characteristics, which becomes very important and useful when trying to 'catch' a psychopath.
     Research investigating, 'Cohesion in texts produced by psychopathic and non-psychopathic criminal inmates' has found that there is a difference in pitch and voice emphasis, therefore focusing on paralinguistics. The researchers found that there is not a change between neutral and emotional words for psychopaths but this is frequent for non-psychopaths. Other research done by M.T Woodworth and S.Porter show how they found that psychopath's language is less emotionally intense but that they use past-tense verbs in their narrative more, showing the linguistic analysis that they have a detachment from the crime due to the choice of their linguistics. They also found that the psychopaths had more dis-fluencies and fillers, such as, 'um' and 'er'. It is believed that this tendency is to hide their sanity. An important difference they found between non-psychopaths and psychopaths is the subject matter of their speech. For psychopaths they found that they relied on talking about material needs such as food, drink and money, whereas the non-psychopaths tended to focus on family and religion. Therefore this research could help define the motives and thoughts behind the criminal minds of psychopaths.
    When people are labelled with disorders, such as a being 'psychopath' this means that they are 'different 'from the majority of the general population. Whereas with the non-psychopathic murderer the characteristic profile can be made as they are like me and you (obviously without the murder part), which allows the police to understand the criminal and the crime. However with the psychopathic criminals their linguistics and body Language are hard to piece together, therefore this research allows the police to get a better understanding of them as potentially they are very dangerous to society.

Megan Banks