Spotting Psychopaths based on Language? | Do Disfluencies point to Psychopathy?

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel oh this is dr. Grande today's question is is it possible to identify somebody with psychopathy a psychopath by the language that they use and there have been a number of studies that we've seen in the literature about this topic and there's a particular interest around this idea of disfluencies so I'll talk about this question I'll answer this question but also specifically about my thoughts on disfluencies this fluency is a word that interrupts a sentence and the ones we think of usually are and uh throughout this video I'm sure I'll use a number of these so it will get a lot of examples of disfluencies there so I'll put the references to the articles that I use for this video in the description for this video and when we look at some of the more significant articles around psychopathy and language we see the course individuals that are psychopathic who are being studied are oftentimes in forensic environments so they're in prison and one of the studies I'll be using here was looking at specifically individuals who are psychopathic or in prison who committed murder and comparing them to individuals who are not psychopathic who were in prison and committed murder so is there a basis for this research so if we take a look back a bit if we step back from this can language really be used to determine if somebody has personality characteristics or mental disorders well we see in the literature that there's this idea that some language is unconscious and there are four elements like word choice productivity so how many words somebody says in a certain period of time and other patterns can be used to identify specific mental disorders and some studies actually have shown that some of these methods are fairly reliable so there is more or less a basis but I'm skeptical when I started to read these studies and even when I was finished reading these studies I remain a bit skeptical about how valuable languages in terms of identifying sie specifically so let's talk about the theory behind us so theory is that psychopathic language is going to be less cohesive than non psychopathic language we see as part of this theory that there's an instrumental nature to psychopathy so there's a deliberate kind of goal orientation there and also individuals who are psychopathic pay more attention to material needs and they're less worried about relationships and emotions so we see an emotional deficit so if we look just at these three areas the instrumental nature the focus on material goods or material gain and the emotional deficit we see support for all these theories that these different elements point back to psychopathy in terms of individuals who are psychopathic and committed murders some psychopathic murders the literature tells us that 93% of these types of murders had an external goal and that the murder was premeditated when we look at non psychopathic murderers that percentage drops to 48 percent now we also see a difference with the hierarchy of needs so this would support that difference around the material gain if we consider Maslow's hierarchy needs for example we see the basic needs like food shelter clothing at the bottom and more complex needs up top the highest need is self-actualization on that particular model we see that Psychopaths tend to focus on the basic needs and don't tend to worry too much about self-esteem spirituality and relationships now in terms of the emotional deficit component we see a lot of research that Psychopaths have difficulty interpreting and experiencing emotions they tend to produce fewer and less intense emotional words they have more disfluencies I talked about that before and I'll get to that a little later in more detail so again where it's like um and uh which tend to increase when individuals are facing multiple cognitive choices and demands at least that's the theory but again I'll talk more about that in detail and they tend to use language that reflects increased cycle distancing so they tend to distance themselves from unpleasant events so an example here would be using the past tense when something happened really just a few moments ago so using the past tense more often is what we would align here with psychopathy so all this information is taken together to form this theory that these differences would be reflected in language so the main study I'm talking about here again is looking at psychopathic murderers versus non psychopathic murderers in a forensic setting so we're really talking about an unusual event and a very small population that's important to keep in mind and I'll talk more about that later as well the limitations of the study what we see here is when individuals who were psychopathic and non psychopathic we're recalling the details of a homicide that they committed there were some fairly significant differences between these two groups the Psychopaths indicated more cause-and-effect statements so they demonstrated more goal orientation we also saw that Psychopaths use twice as many words related to basic and self-preservation type needs like eating drinking and acquiring money and money of course can be used to buy food and drink so this may stand out to people because it seems unusual to use those type of basic needs references when talking about something like homicide but again twice as many words related to these needs and we see here that the non psychopathic offenders the non psychopathic murders use more language related to family religion spirituality and social needs we see that the psychopathic murderers tended to use less emotionally intense descriptions of the crime and they also used less emotionally Pleasant language so their language was more coarse we see that the psychopathic language was substantially more disfluent than what we saw with the non psychopathic murderers and this means there were more disfluencies again connecting back to this theory that there was more of a cognitive load so this Psychopaths had more difficulty putting the story together in a way that would appear appropriate so this really emotionally charged event a homicide they were trying to manage their impressions they're trying to appear a certain way to the interviewer and this leads back to this theory again that that's why there's more disfluencies that's why they say and like and so more often because they're trying to buy time to appear appropriate to think of the right words to appear appropriate so there are some interesting findings from the study but does this study really tell us a lot about psychopathy and how we can spot psychopathy and everyday life well I don't think it does I think one of the real difficulties here would be around the limitations for example the psychopathic murderers were recalling a homicide that they committed this is a highly unusual situation for an individual to be in first of all somebody has to commit a homicide and then be arrested and convicted and sent to prison and there's the effects of prison these individuals were incarcerated for an average of ten years so there's just a lot of differences between a psychopath that would be encountered in the general public and the individuals here in this study another important element to keep in mind is the psychopathic murderers were more instrumental in the way they committed the crime so perhaps the less emotional nature of their descriptions was simply a reflection of the type of crime they committed so they really didn't have strong emotions necessarily at the time the murder was committed so it really wouldn't be surprising that they weren't emotional when they recalled the homicide now there was another study that was published later on and I'll include that reference to in the description they talked about online communication and psychopathy so really had tried to move this study which again took place in a prison out into the general public specifically in text messaging emails and Facebook communications and they did find that the psychological distancing was still there they also found narcissistic components were still there so an online communication psychopaths tended not to refer to the other person in the conversation as much and they saw that Psychopaths produced less comprehensible text and used more hostile language specifically interpersonally hostile language so language indicated a lot of anger and distress so this other study really supports part of this finding we see in the original study so some of these findings may be generalizable to a wider population but there were some differences for example they found that in terms of basic needs psychopaths and non Psychopaths couldn't be differentiated with online communication meaning the psychopaths didn't stand out in terms of focusing more on basic needs when they were communicating online remember this was a finding with the psychopathic murderers they did tend to reference basic needs more so I'm looking for further research on this I think this is an interesting satisfies these two studies and we've seen some other studies related to this as well and I'm not convinced that you can really spot a psychopath from the different language they use so part of this I really want to expand on is this idea specifically of disfluencies and language and this really speaks to why I'm skeptical that language can be used to identify Psychopaths it's not just the limitations of the study it's the theory behind psychopathy and specifically how it relates to language so what our disfluencies well as I mentioned disfluencies are times when somebody interrupts a sentence with a word like um so well like where they might repeat a word and there's a lot of theories about why people do this this is actually remarkably common right we look around and we see this one sees everywhere we might see them less in formal speech and more in informal speech but either way they appear in both so one theory here is that people are trying to think they use disfluencies to pause so they can find the right word and that's really the theory that was used in this paper with the psychopathic and non psychopathic murderers so the idea here is that disfluencies are simply fillers so somebody's just trying to stall to select a word that would be more appropriate and the research actually doesn't really support this there's some studies that show that this could be the case but there are other studies that show that disfluencies are really words that we choose to use on purpose to signal a delay in how we're presenting our thought to signal delay in the narrative and the theory here is that the word uh is used to signal a minor delight and the word um is used to signal a major delay so this really runs against this idea that disfluencies are unconscious and as people are trying to find the right word they're simply putting these disfluencies in without realizing it this other theory suggests that their deliberate they're actually words that we use that have a purpose so in essence they're not really superfluous although they're usually negatively looked at like a lot of people wish that they didn't use disfluencies and a lot of people would prefer that other people didn't use them but they do serve a purpose and I don't think they're a signal of laziness or people not learning to speak a language correctly or anything like that I think they're actually used to signal delays I think this makes more sense there's a study that talks about this I'll put the reference to that one in the description of this video as well one related theory that I want to mention here at disfluencies is the idea that perhaps disfluencies have become so popular because people don't want to be interrupted when they're talking so they're talking to other people and they really want to maintain control the conversation a little bit so when they know what delay is coming they put this disfluency in and that's like a placeholder so it's really very consistent with the signaling of delay what they're saying is there's a delay coming and I don't want to be interrupted and one of the ideas here that I think of is that perhaps narcissism this increase in narcissism has led to more use of disfluencies so what I mean by this is again if somebody's trying to talk and in general people tend to be more narcissistic they're more concerned that somebody's going to interrupt the more can that people aren't good at conversation they're not good at the balance the back-and-forth so they put these disfluencies in again to kind of keep things locked up to make sure that they can hold the floor and they can finish their thought now another way look at this is if you kind of run out of ideas in the middle of a sentence you could use the despondency to signal to somebody that they should interject so there are a lot of different ways to look at this fluencies but overall I think they are really more conscious than they are unconscious and that's what I'm really getting at is the theory behind why Psychopaths use more discipline seas I think that theory needs to be looked at more closely before drawing conclusions like we could identify Psychopaths based on disfluencies so with this study a few people have wrote to me they put comments on my channel or some emails and they were concerned that they were psychopathic because they use disfluencies that's why you really address this question this disfluency question specifically more thoroughly here now if somebody uses words like um and unlike and so and all that to me that's not really a sign at all of psychopathy I really wouldn't worry about that at all there's other symptoms of psychopathy that would be more concerning like if somebody's callous unemotional deceptive manipulative has a lack of empathy elements like that yes those would be more concerning but using disfluencies I'm not really worried about that that in isolation doesn't tell me really anything about a person and how many psychopathic traits they may or may not have I think what's happened with disfluencies is we see this increase in perfectionism so people are trying to eliminate every area of possible criticism again this is highly consistent with an increase in narcissism as I mentioned before but I think that working to eliminate disfluencies I think it's a noble effort I think again it makes sense for formal conversation but I also believe it comes at a cost somebody's really trying to focus their energy on being perfect and not using the signals that they've become accustomed to using and this comes at the cost of not focusing on their topic I would rather listen to somebody who uses this one sees but tells the story the way they wanted at allit they tell the story accurately and with all the correct emotion infused that they wanted if that comes at the price of a few dis one sees I'm okay with that I'm worried that there's too much focus here on being perfect we already see this emphasis on appearing physically perfect where people don't want to have their picture taken or be recorded on video unless there's no flaws and now we're moving to where people are paying attention to language and saying oh because you use alors uh something's wrong with you this is a dangerous trend in my opinion and again I think this is so linked to narcissism and perfectionism I'm just kind of worried about it and then with the study coming out and this came out some time ago but again people read it whenever like they might have read it a month ago or a year ago and all these concerns coming in about disfluencies and psychopathy yes this is not something I would worry about I wouldn't really spend any time being concerned with disfluencies especially when it comes to concerns about how it links to psychopathy the reality of course is that any behavior can be problematic at a certain level so if you find yourself using disfluencies all the time and people are always commenting on that and saying look it's distracting I can't understand what you're saying well then maybe you want to look at it in terms of what you can do to reduce the use of disfluencies but it still doesn't mean there's any psychopathy going on those are two completely different areas there and again I don't think it's logical to invest a lot of time being concerned about being a psychopath just based on some language tendencies so moving back to these studies yes these types of studies are interesting and psychopathy is an interesting topic a lot of people are fascinated with psychopathy sociopathy narcissism and even murderers like serial killers but we have to be careful about the kinds of connections we're making we're taking really subtle signs and these studies can be misinterpreted it's certainly not the fault of people who produce the literature it's more in how people interpret the literature there needs to be a certain level of experience in training to interpret research literature there are a lot of subtleties and nuances to research literature so careful interpretation is really the key so I know whenever I talk about psychopathy sociopathy and these different topics and especially how these individuals can be identified it generates a lot of interest and a lot of thoughts if you have any thoughts on what I've mentioned in this video if you agree or disagree please put those thoughts in the comments as always I hope you found this description of psychopathy and language to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 350,441

Keywords: spotting a psychopath, spotting a sociopath, psychopathy, psychopath, sociopathy, sociopath, language, disfluencies, narcissism, perfectionism, relationships, basic needs, serial killers, murderers, callous, unemotional, deception, manipulation, superficial charm, sensation seeking, extraversion, neuroticism, antisocial personality disorder, homicide, counseling

Id: 23RrtfX5RKc

Length: 18min 18sec (1098 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 15 2019