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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.
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.
To continue your point. TFA says: "psychopaths often use cause-and-effect descriptors"
So do scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.
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
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.
Inconveniently(but understandably) the population available for research tends to skew very heavily toward the sorts of psychopaths whose behavior gets them sent to prison for violent crimes.
There is abundant reason to suspect that a fair few somewhat smarter ones, who exhibit many of the same undesirable traits but know that overt violent crime usually isn't the best way to get what you want, walk among us; but locating them and convincing them to sit down for some research is tricky. The ones doing time for murder, on the other hand, aren't going anywhere and are conveniently concentrated.
It's a very unfortunate sampling bias, because the ones you can't study are exactly the ones it would be most useful to know more about. While dangerous, people prone to impulsive violence tend get weeded out by police or internecine violence comparatively quickly. The ones that are less overtly dangerous, and/or prefer legal hobbies, are not so convenient.
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
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
It's virtually impossible to draw conclusions about any paper from its abstract. Has anyone seen the full text? If so, can you report to us how this experiment was conducted, what the data were, and how they were analyzed? If not, we are all shouting down a well.
Walter Hopps will be here in twenty minutes.
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.
Psychopathy is rare. Any decent sized random sample of college students would suffice as a control.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Then you have a trial in the Senate and impeach him.
It's the "ffffssssfffssssffffsssffffsss" noise that usually tips me off.
I think the point is, you don't get into positions of great power like that without stepping on a lot of people and totally throwing out your innate sense of right and wrong...which you probably didn't have in the first place. That goes for both Bush and Gore.
For their emotions and actions. "I killed the bunny because Mary wouldn't take her underpants off." It is a deviation from the average (greater than the standard deviation, I assume). Whatever the causes are, psychopaths feel a greater than normal need to justify their behavior and feelings via external references.
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"
"Yo, dawg, I heard you liked prison..."
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
I'm hoping that things in the DSM are included or not included because having the condition is harmful to your self or others.
Being clinically depressed does adversely affect your life. Being manic depressive does affect your life. Being a psychopath is often very harmful to the people around the psychopath. I think some kids diagnosed with ADS are just a little more active than some "well behaved" kids and sometimes we are too quick to label them and medicate them.
Now that religious myth has less sway on many peoples moral values, being homosexual is no longer seen as harmful. I'm assuming you are being sarcastic when you state simply being homosexual is riskier than being heterosexual.
Anarchists never rule
Killing people for fun is frowned upon by virtually all cultures. This isn't some transient fad. Simply being a psychopath doesn't get you incarcerated. It is the behaviour it leads to when the lack of empathy, lack of moral, and narcissism lead to acts that please the psychopath while harming those around him.
In what way does western culture promote psychopathic behaviour?
Anarchists never rule
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.
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.
Funny, nothing you suggest here about the harms of homosexuality are psychological harms. You realize that the DSM is designed to classify people who are experiencing mental problems, right? So, "lack of procreativity" shouldn't be included, or else being post-vasectomy would be in the DSM. "Increased STD occurrence" shouldn't be included, or else refusing to wear a condom would be a cause for being in the DSM... as would being a teenager. Social effects and suicide rates? They examined those issues, it turns out that not all homosexuals experience social problems, nor do they all attempt suicide. In fact, some homosexuals seem to be quite well adjusted and capable of performing well in a professional career. The psychologists knew this, because they had well adjusted people working in their field.
Leaving it out of the DSM is pure politics, not evidence-based medicine.
It wasn't pure politics. There was a lot of politics, because the only reason why being homosexual was in the DSM was because people believed that you couldn't be homosexual without having mental, and/or social issues. As more and more psychologists came out as being homosexual, it forced the community to recognize that, hey, being homosexual did not automatically imply that the person required psychological intervention.
Before these psychologists came out, the only homosexuals that the psychologists ever dealt with were ones who were already having "comorbid" psychological issues. So, it turns out that the psychologists thought that homosexuality automatically implied psychiatric distress was because the only people who admitted to being homosexual to them were people who were in psychiatric distress. There was a confirmation bias going on. Mentally healthy homosexuals didn't come out, and so they were hidden. And they were hidden for good reason: to avoid discrimination.
As a total hyothetical, take for example the idea that the only time doctors ever saw an appendix was if it were inflamed and infected. They would naturally presume that the only state an appendix exists in is inflamed and infected. After all, they had never seen an uninfected appendix. Now, imagine that they finally do find someone who has died, and has an uninfected appendix. Clearly, it is now not the case that appendices are pathological. They're simply a variation of human anatomy.
In the same way, psychologists were forced to recognize that homosexuality does not automatically present with mental health issues. Other ancillary conditions of homosexual body health are not sufficient to make homosexuality into a mental health disorder.
As a final note: women are more susceptible to STDs, they have a higher incident of uterine, ovarian, and cervix cancer, and in fact, there are special parts of hospitals devoted solely to treating women. Does this mean being a woman should be declared a mental health disorder? No, clearly not. It's noted on their charts like being a smoker, as there are ancillary health issues that any doctor should be aware of, but "being a smoker" is not a health disorder, and neither is "being a woman". Just like "being homosexual" is not a health disorder.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
>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.
Yeah, I have the feeling trying to talk about this here is a losing battle, because no one seems to know what a psychopath is, but you're correct.
Psychopaths have trouble because they don't actually have any empathy. Psychopaths do not have to kill people, or anything like that. They simply are utterly uncaring about how other people feel in any respect. (And most of them are smart enough to fake otherwise.)
Because they do not understand stuff that is obvious to everyone, they often end up explaining why they did something that was just obvious to everyone.
And this isn't just bad things. Psychopaths often do good things because people are watching, and they know that society says that's what they're 'supposed' to do. But they don't actually think that.
So when you ask them about why they held a door for an old person, their actual reason is 'Because I looked good doing that', but they obviously can't say that, so they'll come up with some sort of reason that doesn't make much sense.
Whereas normal people say, "Uh, because she was having trouble with it, duh."
Normal people automatically act towards each other in a certain way. Even criminals _feel_ that way, even if they ignore it. Psychopaths are doing mostly the same thing, but by rote. They learned the rules and follow them.
For psychopaths, explaining behavior in moral terms is like someone with literally no sense of humor trying to explain jokes. You could study jokes, and why and how they're funny, and laugh at the right places and fool people, but, in the end, if asked to explain, your explanations of any specific joke are distinguishable from people with actual sense of humor, at least with enough analysis.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?