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Correlating Psychopathy With Speech Patterns
florescent_beige writes "Researchers from Cornell and UBC report that analysis of speech patterns using Wmatrix, along with something called the Dictionary of Affect in Language (see a demo here), shows that psychopaths speak differently from other people, at least statistically (abstract). Although they say that these differences are 'presumably beyond conscious control,' the authors do not say if the method has any predictive use. Regardless, the popular press has already gone headline-nonlinear about it."
With an irresponsible paper title like that, the authors were inviting a media circus. We're talking about research into people with mental disorder here, not a new friday night drama series.
May the Maths Be with you!
When I was younger, I used "because" and "since" in my writing about twice as often. Never terribly pleased by the effect--that's just how it came out. They are fairly weak transitions, useful mostly if you want a weak transition which detracts less from a central element.
This excess tapered off as I became more deeply immersed in my subject matter with age and experience. In my own history, these words were sign posts of incomplete thinking.
Dubious. A statistical significance to a pattern is merely an indicator of an actual relationship.
From TFA:
"psychopathic murderers make identifiable word choices – beyond their conscious control – when talking about their crimes."
So we aren't talking about all psychos, just the murdering ones. And apparently only about how they refer to their crimes. But they immediately make the jump to using it as a predictive tool on social media, making it sound like you could scan peoples' Facebook postings and play "spot the killer".
Seems like a troll to me. Shame on you Cornell University Press Relations.
It's about time we found more people to lock up! I mean there's been a serious drought of convictions in the last century...
How about we lock up those who lock people up? That would be new and exciting.
There may be something to this. Certainly if I hear someone using the terms "liver", "fava beans" and "chianti" too often in a conversation, I start to get worried.
It says that psychopaths use more connecting conjunctions than average people, words like "since" and "because".
In other words they speak better English than the average no-clause baby talk people use when they're not writing.
Yay, this means that when courts are abusing the latest research into psychopaths to decide how to punish people, intelligent people will be treated worse. They're already misusing research like this.
I think this is true for all of them. A psychopath just doesn't give a damn about anyone else. This is what you can identify him by.
I have no doubt that the biggest a-holes you can think of are all psychopaths. Possibly more or less by definition even though psychopaths/socipaths can be recognized by brain pattern.
I said it before on slashdot, that a good way to know someone is like this, even when he tries to hide his nature to fit in as psychopaths/sociopaths do, is by looking at reversible arguments.
George W.Bush for example when the elections were not settled and he said that Gore should let him get on with what he needed to do... As the vote count was close, Gore could have given the exact argument to Bush. Of course such reversible arguments are non-arguments, and such a-holes like Bush use them because they can't hide their identity well enough. They have a set of ways of acting and reacting which fools some people, but not those who take note.
A Horizon programme (BBC, UK) recently talked about psychopaths in "Are you good or are you evil" and these people are often in boards of companies, or high level bosses or whatever. A way they said they could identify these psychopaths is by the fact that half the people working for such a person hates him, the other half think he (she?) is great. This already shows the claim they made psychopaths are hard to spot is BS. People who look at the way people speak, the feeling/emotion in it I mean, know immediately when someone is a psychopath.
The second comma should be removed, otherwise you should be able to remove the middle section and have a complete/correct sentence.
I actually think this is rather spot on. I often see psychopaths on Something Awful, Portal of Evil, Encyclopedia Dramatica talk like the person in this facebook screencap: http://twitpic.com/7065mw
I mean, who thought you could seriously learn about psychopathic killers from a bunch of talking heads?
I am officially gone from
I have a different method for detecting psychopathy. It has predictive power.
Those who work for the government, big banks, big oil, and the other oligarchs are psychopaths. As a bonus, they're easy to find. So let's round them up and commit them so they can get the treatment they need.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Since this is a poorly conceived exercise concocted because a few academics were looking for more government funding, I will not pay attention to it because it will obviously lead to a witch hunt since some people simply make different word choices than others.
Ah. So by your analysis it seems, psychopaths are someone who you disagree with politically, may use a particular form of argument that most polticians use at some point or that a lot of people who've met them don't like.
Thus, Martin Luther King must have been a psychopath because quite a number of people (politicians and officials), especially in the south disgreed with him politically, didn't like him regardless that they'd met with him and he used a wide variety of argument styles as needed for his cause.
So, you have figured out how easy it is to find psychopaths where trained professionals fail. Maybe you should get a grant and write a paper. You'll make millions advising law enforcement and mental health care centers.
But, isn't it a little more likely you're just rationalizing your preexisting viewpoints?
Or perhaps they could try correlating how you speak to what you majored in in college. Maybe there's even a secondary correlation between majoring in English and psychopathy?
Hello, speech analysis, I am proud to welcome you to the select club of phrenology, graphology, astrology and numerology.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
A very important distinction here: "psychopathic murderers make identifiable word choices – beyond their conscious control – when talking about their crimes", and from the abstract, "This study used statistical text analysis to examine the features of crime narratives provided by psychopathic homicide offenders. Psychopathic speech was predicted to reflect an instrumental/predatory world view, unique socioemotional needs, and a poverty of affect". This study was only looking at how a specific type of already identified criminal discussed the crimes they committed and then concluding that those word choices matched up with an already established set of diagnostic criteria. You wouldn't be able to take that and generalize it to everyday speaking patterns. Also, there were only 14 "psychopaths" used in the research and 38 controls. That's far from what I'd call a comprehensive study. There is no way, at this point, that this could be called more than coorelational evidence. Not only that, there is an assumption in the research (that these speech patterns are "beyond conscious control") that is untested and could be a bias in the research. The CBS article obviously is meant to be sensationalist, which is terribly irresponsible. Maybe they should learn some basics of research methodology before making conclusions about a study (or at least pay for and read the entire research before jumping to any conclusions. It is obvious they didn't go any further than the abstract, because that's all they quote from). But I suppose it's my own fault for being surprised that a news outlet is jumping to radical conclusions about something before they have all the information (or a basic understanding of what they are reporting about).
How do they know the control group wasn't psychopaths? Maybe what they are measuring is the speech pattern differences in relaxed "out of the closet" pyscopaths versus psychopaths in hiding.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I suspect that all psychologists are unfamiliar with, or readily dislike conceptual metaphors.
It would be interesting to compare high level managerÂs speech patterns against the results of this study...
As Yoda's evil twin would say.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Can we use something like IBM's Watson to realtime parse and evaluate political rhetoric?
A "Psyco Score" at the bottom of the screen during election debates would be quite novel...
Dear glorybe,
We have analysyed your message and will shortly be detatching officers to retrieve you.
Hugs and Kisses,
Your friendly pre-cog unit
Building a safer, less psychotic society
For the budding psychopaths out there who want to "fit in" better with society, here's how to change your speech patterns.
1) Join Toastmasters along with someone you see frequently (a significant other, close friend, or coworker).
It's cheap, and they will teach you ways to improve your speech - how to recognize disfluencies, for instance.
2) Play a game with your partner where every time they hear you make a mistake, they say "ding!". That's all - just "ding!" every time they hear a problem.
(For what it's worth I've found that GF's are particularly good at noticing such flaws.)
It takes a week or two, but the constant feedback will eventually sink in and you'll be able to hold long conversations without saying "ah", "um", "you know", and so on.
3) Rhythm, meter, and pauses are more difficult. Find a newscaster whose vocal style you like and record one of their broadcasts.
It doesn't matter whether you agree with their point of view, only that you like their vocal variety. (You could choose Rush Limbaugh, for instance.) I chose Morley Safer.
Edit the broadcasts into individual sentences and rip these to a CD as individual tracks. While you are driving to work, play a sentence on infinite repeat. Recite the sentence along with the speaker over and over. Try to recite it exactly, mimicking the pauses and intonations.
You'll spend a few iterations just remembering the words. Once you know the words, your ear will start to pick out subtle emphasis and pauses used by the speaker. You'll start to learn when to pause (after prepositions, for instance), where to put emphasis to make a point, and so on.
When you get bored, switch to another sentence.
Don't do the mimicry thing more than a couple of weeks or you'll end up sounding *exactly* like the broadcaster. Switch to another one, mix it up a little.
As a side effect of all this, people will view your method of speech as more meaningful, you will be perceived as more reliable and confident, and people will give you greater respect.
The psychopath uses a teleprompter?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
no fucking way word patterns indicate psychopathology you ignorant motherfucker
i'll take a fucking broomstick and ram it down your fucking gullet if i hear one fucking peep from your ignorant piehole about word patterns indicating a propensity for psychopathology and then rape your mother with the same fucking broomstick. are fucking listening to me?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Fixed
We already know that excessive pauses in acting predict stupid commercials for Internet Startups and really bad science fiction. Damn... You... Khhaaaaannnn!!!!
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
"Vote for me, and I'll set you free!"
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Ah, because the world is round, it turns me on
Because the world is round, ah
Because the wind is high, it blows my mind
Because the wind is high, ah
Love is old, love is new
Love is all, love is you
Because the sky is blue, it makes me cry
Because the sky is blue, ah, ah, ah, ah
What does this algorithm do when you play rap albums into it? Does it identify Snoop Doggy Dogg, Dr. Dre, and all those rappers as psychopaths? Society considers them to be mainstream entertainment, gives them an exalted position, and showers them with wealth.
Those who "work for" big oil? Everyone from the CEO down to the roughnecks and gas station attendants? If not, how do you know where to draw the line?
Oh, that's right, you weren't making a serious diagnostic suggestion, you were just going for cheap resonant hate.
This just in: if psychopaths' lack of empathy enables them to unfairly profit at others' expense, your capitalist system is fundamentally broken, since the most basic assumption of standard capitalist economics is that actors are characterized by rational self-interest, which is precisely what psychopaths have. So instead of bitching about the psychopaths who exploit the flaws in your system, and leaving the flaws there, fix the goddamn system! On /., of all places, where we routinely mock Sony et al. for this same blame-is-easier-than-competence routine, why isn't this obvious?
I work for the government, you insensitive clod!
Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.
See subject.
psychopaths used more conjunctions such as “because “ or “since,”
Sounds like another attempt to label left-brain people as psychopaths.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
This would never be allowed to be used in America. God forbid politicians and CEOs hear about this technology.
Life is not for the lazy.
The real meat of their software is a small routine that counts references to Huey Lewis, any mention of this artist more than 3 times in a 10 minute period results in a 100% match.
Most experts count roughly one percent of the population as psychotic. The researchers want to take methods used to analyze the language of psychopaths and apply it to the general population using social media.
Psychotic != psychopathic. These are two entirely differing diagnoses.
For the record, most experts count roughly 4% of the population as psychopathic, though a much smaller percentage actually commit violent crimes.
I know it's a joke, but we can try a checklist....
Abstract:
"Psychopaths (relative to their counterparts) included more rational cause-and-effect descriptors (e.g., ‘because’, ‘since’), focused on material needs (food, drink, money), and contained fewer references to social needs (family, religion/spirituality)."
Check.
"Psychopaths’ speech contained a higher frequency of disfluencies (‘uh’, ‘um’) indicating that describing such a powerful, ‘emotional’ event to another person was relatively difficult for them."
Hmm, lets see.
Her mean mother steps then says to me "Hi!!"
Decked Sally in the face and punched her in the eye
Punched her in the belly and stepped on her feet
Slammed the child on the hard concrete
The bitch was strong, the kids was gone
Somethin was wrong I said, "What was goin on?"
I tried to break up, I said, "Stop it, just leave her!"
She said, "If I can't smoke none, she can't either!"
No, doesn't seem like it.
"Finally, psychopaths used more past tense and less present tense verbs in their narrative, indicating a greater psychological detachment from the incident, and their language was less emotionally intense and pleasant."
"La Di Da Di, we likes to party
We don't cause trouble, we don't bother nobody
We're, just some niggaz who're on the mic
And when we rock up on the mic we rock the mic (right)"
Doesn't fit either.
What about a different diagnosis, narcissitic personality disorder?
"I woke up around 10 o'clock in the mornin
I gave myself a strech up, a mornin yawn and
went to the bathroom to wash up
I threw some soap on my face and put my hands up on a cup
and said um "Mirror mirror, on, the wall
Who is the top Dogg of them all?"
There was a rubble dubble, five minutes it lasted
The mirror said, "You are you conceited bastard"
Well that's true, that's why we never have no beef
So I slipped off my khakis and my gold leaf
Used Oil of Olay, cuz my skin gets pale
And then I got the file, for my fingernails
I'm true to the style on my behalf"
It isn't "numerology" if psycophaths can be statistically identified by numerical analysis.
For example, while most people tend to include certain numbers in their speech more than most, like "ninety-nine", psychopaths make bizarre choices like "fifty-three" and "forty-seven".
the wonderful Wizard of Oz. because because because because BECAUSE!!! Because of the wonderful things he does!
Homosexuality is no longer in the DSM because psychiatry/psychology is a profession like "interior decorator" or "actor". It's loaded with them, and they get to make the decision.
A reasonable analysis would note that the behavior tends to prevent offspring and dramatically increase STD occurrence. It's thus clearly harmful, even ignoring the social effects and suicide rate. We also know it appears to be mainly caused by the womb environment, making it a birth defect. Leaving it out of the DSM is pure politics, not evidence-based medicine.
Psychopathy could easily be removed from the DSM. Notice who makes the laws that regulate this profession? All it takes is a non-discrimination law passed by the psychopaths we elect, and psychopathy leaves the DSM. It's all political anyway.
OTOH, you'll never see ADD/ADHD removed from the DSM. There is too much money to be made from people wanting methamphedamine (Adderall, a.k.a. speed or meth) and other drugs.
Is it possible that the language they are selecting for is simply some form of "prisoner's dialect", instead of a sampling of "sociopathy"? For example, Canadians tend to punctuate verbally with "Eh", and New England urban teens typically finish sentences with "Yo", and use the term "wicked" a lot (or at least they did 20 years ago when I was there). This could be an interpretation of a dialectical shift based on the environment the subject is now occupying, rather than any useful data. It might also be wise to consider the length of incarceration of the subjects of this study, and perhaps use the non-violent (or even non-offenders) occupying the same space as a control group.
Alternatively, one could assume these dangerously violent offenders are typically kept separated from the general population (of prisoners), and so perhaps the language they use is based more upon their observation of the guards and/or legal teams' speech. Assigning the term "psychopathic behavior" to the speech patterns of lawyers and psychiatrists would be amusing, but unhelpful with achieving the stated goal.
Finally, I would find it useful to analyze the recorded speech and writing patterns of someone who was not convicted of a crime until much later in their lifetime, allowing us to study the psychopathic patterns "in the wild".
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
And the crowd goes wild...
So... what you're saying is that the capitalist system/structure is designed to reward those with psychopathic tendencies?
Note to moderators: I'm not sure this should be modded "Funny"
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Psychopathy is an illness, it's not presently curable and the only methods of treatment tend to just result in more abhorrent behavior.
Can you provide a currently accepted manual of diagnosis that lists psychopathy as a disease or disorder? I've looked through the DSM and ICD and can't seem to find it. The reason it's not in either of the accepted diagnostics manuals is because it would be a a Personality Disorder and the personality disorder criteria includes "the individual's characteristic and enduring patterns of inner experience and behaviour as a whole deviate markedly from the culturally expected and accepted range". Psychopathic behavior does not "deviate markedly from the culturally expected and accepted range" in western cultures. Psychopathic behavior is specifically encouraged in western cultures. You will start to see other Personality Disorders drop out of the diagnostics manuals as time progresses. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is already proposed for deletion, as our culture again is not only accepting, but outright promoting Narcissistic behavior.
In general the problem with Personality Disorders is that by definition they are dependent of transient cultural opinion. These are not disorders, but behaviors that can be changed if change is wanted, but they can not be corrected by treatment because they are not a disease.
Note that the study is not saying that psychopaths speak different from ordinary people. They compared 14 psychopathic murderers to 38 murderers who were not diagnosed as psychopaths.
My interpretation would be that the average murderer has below average English skills, while psychopaths try blend in with the non-murderers. Hence they sound different.
http://sail.usc.edu/~kazemzad/emotion_in_text_cgi/DAL_app/index.php?emotional_text=fuckheads+tried+to+steal+my+candy%2C+so+i+had+to+bury+them+all&submit_emotional_text=Send+inn
The last thing we need is a general in the military with strong psychopathic tendencies and the ability to order a strike with modern weapons.
Actually, that's exactly the kind of people I want in all ranks of my military. Of course, my secret police (with equal or greater psychopathic tendencies) would keep them "directed properly".
Do you think the Wehrmacht or Stalin's Red Army would have as difficult time with the Taliban as ISAF is having? No, they'd happily "save the village" by annihilating it.
And they found that the following individuals sounded like psychos: Lloyd Blankfein, Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Stephen Schwarzman, Peter G. Peterson, both of the Koch brothers, Hank Paulson, Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle, Jonathan Kay, ........
Eh, what I'm saying is the cpaitalist system is modeled on the assumption that everyone is a psychopath. Whether populating it with a mix of psychopaths and non-psychopaths necessarily "rewards" psychopaths (or more accurately, penalizes non-psychopaths) is not 100% obvious (certainly seems true in practice), but it's certainly not "designed to" do that -- it's designed to limit them and channel their greed into productive pursuits (profit rather than plunder), as opposed to many communal/gift economies which are designed around non-psychopaths, and thus are left vulnerable to exploitation by psychopaths that get in.
But the point is, if it works when everyone's a psychopath, then only the losers who can't/won't "pass" as a psychopath (/sarcasm) could reasonably be expected to make the system malfunction, and that should happen in a relatively benign way -- they lose some of their own wealth due to their own empathy-influenced choices, but that's better than a psychopath being able to take someone else's wealth (which would lead them to pursue plunder over profit). If psychopaths can make the system malfunction, then somewhere along the way somebody broke something (like, say, letting robber barons or their corporate successors write all your legislation), and we need to fix that, not go on a witch hunt (however emotionally satisfying) for the people who saw and used the opportunity.
the popular press has already gone headline-nonlinear about it."
Don't get any ideas. Slashdot is also the popular press.
Just look at all the transitional words:
"Because, because, because, because, because! Because of the wonderful things he does!"
This research uses offenders in Canada to analyze speech patterns. Extending conclusions to areas with other dialects seems flawed. Of course the ease of processing written words to allow discrimination combined with the obvious potential for financial gain will lead to groups smashing through academic considerations and ethics like a freight train.
I question the emotional flatness description of psychopaths. The prison environment surely introduces a bias in emotions and their expression. Are there no bipolar psychopaths?
Funny you should mention Afghanistan... It turns out that the Red Army did, in fact, have a rather hard time there with the people who later became the Taliban. So hard, in fact, that they were eventually forced to retreat despite employing brutal tactics and the occupation was described as Russia's Vietnam.
I work as a transcriptionist, including transcribing political debates, and having to listen to people word for word I can attest that you can get a sense of when people are lying, and when they are saying something new versus something already known from their perspective, although it's not clear how reliable the correlations really are.
I'm wondering what their control group was. If they're analysing the speech of people "when talking about their crimes", then they presumably are not comparing them with the general population who have no convictions.
You sucked Linus' dick because you hated yourself, since you were a Windows fanbio.
>Two text analysis tools were used to examine the crime narratives of 14 psychopathic and 38 non-psychopathic homicide offenders
The abstract indicates that the study only looked at homicide offenders, and compared them only to other homicide offenders, not to any non-homicide offenders. They also only looked at a total of 52 people which doesn't seem like enough to me. There are so many factors which can change an individual's speech patters that claiming that the findings mean anything at all is irresponsible.
Take this study with a statistically significant grain of salt.
Good grammar and elocution probably qualify.
have emphatically proved that the single most deadly reason why people die is water as almost every dead person had a history of drinking water.
From TFA: "psychopathic murderers make identifiable word choices [...] when talking about their crimes"
Aha - there's the key! First sit them down, get them to talk about the murders they've committed, and then it'll be easy to figure out who's the psychopath and who isn't!
(I'm *cough* aiming to modded up as 'Funny' - I fully understand that the article discusses work of much greater substance that my frivolous post implies :) )
Note that I said, "Stalin's Red Army" and not the diluted version of it that occupied Afghanistan. If they had killed every single military aged male in Afghanistan, that would have been the end of any problems (at least for a generation).
This article reminded me of something. At the start of Bosnian war local Croatian forces had 2 factions, HVO and HOS. A group of HVO soldiers killed HOS main commander. After the killing, testimony of one the killers surfaced in the press. He told how much was he payed, how they killed him and after that how they overate themselves with fried young pork meat.
This article has surely caused massive paranoia amongst politicians. I reckon a few generals are nervous too. I can think of no greater affectation indicating psychopathy than that which can compulsively lie to those who would - and do - die for the liars. I just hope the World's Thorazine supplies can accommodate the District of Columbia; and I can think of a few individuals who might require a little more than a fair share. What we must first decide, is where to put them. I am thinking Novaya Zemlya might do, but Mars also remains an option in the event that Russia objects (likely).
Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made. - Otto von Bismarck
It is called: Antisocial Personality Disorder for a reason (Psychopathy is so hollywood)
Seems obvious to me that someone who is constantly lying would speak differently from other people. Oliver Sacks discribes some of his patients as walking lie detectors because they could pick up on insincere speech patterns, they would always laugh when someone lied...anytime a politician was on television hilarity followed. So if there is a methode to be derived from this study perhaps we use it on PR people, salesmen, politicians, poker players and scientific writers.
From the DSM:
"The essential feature of Antisocial Personality Disorder is a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.This pattern has also been referred to as psychopathy, sociopathy, or dyssocial personality disorder. Because deceit and manipulation are central features of Antisocial Personality Disorder,..."
Legal and Criminological Psychology? I'm sure that Nature Neuroscience had something much more interesting this last week, so why are we pulling articles from the bottom of the barrel?