What Can We Learn About Psychopathic Offenders by Studying Their Communication? A Review of the Literature

Objective Linguistic Markers Associated with Callous-Unemotional Traits in Early Childhood

BACKGROUND

Callous-unemotional (CU) traits are associated with interpersonal difficulties and risk for severe conduct problems (CP). The ability to communicate thoughts and feelings is critical to social success, with language a promising treatment target. However, no prior studies have examined objective linguistic correlates of childhood CU traits in early childhood, which could give insight into underlying risk mechanisms and novel target treatments.

METHODS

We computed lexical (positive emotion, sad, and anger words) and conversational (interruptions and speech rate) markers produced by 131 children aged 5-6 years (M = 5.98; SD = 0.54, 58.8% female) and their parents while narrating wordless storybooks during two online visits separated by 6-8 weeks (M = 6.56, SD = 1.11; two books, order counterbalanced). Audio recordings were diarized, time-aligned, and orthographically transcribed using WebTrans. Conversational markers were calculated using R and word frequencies were calculated using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software. We examined links between child CU traits and linguistic markers, and explored whether relationships were moderated by child sex.

RESULTS

Higher CU traits were associated with fewer positive emotion words produced by parents and children. Higher CU traits were also associated with greater concordance in the degree of interruptions and expression of anger emotion words by parents and children.

CONCLUSIONS

Results suggest that objective linguistic correlates of CU traits are detectable during early childhood, which could inform adjunctive treatment modules that improve outcomes by precisely tracking and targeting subtle communication patterns.

The novel narrative technique uncovers emotional scripts in individuals with psychopathy and high trait anxiety

Mental representations are of great importance for understanding human behaviour. The aim of this article is to present an innovative way to assess emotional scripts, which are a form of mental representations of emotional events, based on an analysis of narratives and their contents. Theoretical background on emotional schemas and scripts is provided along with information about types of related measures. Then, a rationale is presented for introducing an assessment of scripts related to specific emotions such as love, hate, and anxiety in a psychopathological context. This is followed by a perspective explaining the procedure of the relevant technique based on narrative data analysis. The technique has been successfully applied in two studies [I study (n- 200), II study (n- 280)]. A total of 1440 narratives about specific emotions have been analyzed to identify the indicators of scripts. The psychometric properties of the proposed technique have been established such as reliability, inter-rater agreement, and accuracy. The results show the value of the assessment of emotional script in individuals, particularly with high psychopathy and high trait anxiety. The contents of love and hate scripts are an illustration of cognitive distortions and deficits in the emotional information processing in individuals with psychopathy. The method enables the collection of informative data on romantic love, hate, and anxiety scripts which provides insight into how people may perceive and experience emotions and how they behave emotionally. Future research should focus on verification of the technique in other types of psychopathology and on the improvement of computer software dedicated to the narrative technique described in this paper.

The Differentiation of Narrative Styles in Individuals with High Psychopathic Deviate

The current study was designed to show the differentiation of narrative styles in individuals with high scores in Psychopathic deviate (Pd) scale and develop a method enabling identification of psychopathic personality traits based on linguistic indicators. 600 spontaneous narrations related to emotional topics have been examined for grammar, syntactic, and lexical indicators. The indicators have been selected based on a review related to language of psychopaths. The narrations were written by 200 persons who were also tested for psychopathic deviate and intelligence level, including prisoners diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. Independent judges identified the linguistic indicators which were then counted for each person with the use of computer software. The configuration profiles of the linguistic indicators/narrative styles were established using k-mean clustering method. Then, ANOVA was performed to show which clusters differentiate the levels of psychopathic deviate. The findings show there are two configurations of language features (important: single features were not examined) associated with high levels of psychopathic deviate patterns. Two narrative styles were identified, labelled demonstrative-digressive-egocentric-emotional-dogmatic and reserved-focused on the topic-repetitive, which indicate high psychopathic deviate traits. The ROC curves were applied to establish the prediction of the narrative styles for high psychopathic deviate scores.