This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Popular culture often depicts people with psychopathy as cold, emotionless and hollow, but a recent University of Mississippi study found that the language associated with psychopathic traits is more complicated than often described. University of Mississippi psychologists studied hundreds of autobiographical essays and found that the three traits often used as a framework to understand psychopathy—boldness, meanness and disinhibition—were linked to different patterns in language.
The researchers published their findings in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. "The goal here is not to diagnose psychopathy based on language," said Ky Bray, an Ole Miss doctoral candidate in psychology. "It's to point to the fact that psychopathy shows up in everyday behaviors, even subtle behaviors like language.
"If we want to understand psychopathy and the different traits that comprise it, we need to think creatively about how these traits shape social interaction." The framework using these three traits to understand and assess the pathology is called the Triarchic Model of Psychopathy. The traits can influence everyday actions and behaviors, such as the way a person talks about themselves, said Laura Drislane, assistant professor of psychology. The researchers surveyed 450 participants, including college students and people who reported prior incarceration.
Drislane and Bray first asked participants to answer open-ended questions about their life's high, low and turning points. Then participants filled out a survey to measure their psychopathic traits. The researchers used text-analysis software to examine how often participants used words associated with categories such as positive tone, negative tone, achievement, clout and risk.
They found that people scoring higher in disinhibition were more likely to use negative words and less likely to reference friends, use positive words or use words related to achievement. Higher meanness was associated with more positive tone and more achievement- and reward-related language, with less negative emotional language. People scoring higher in boldness used fewer words related to anxiety—such as fear, afraid or worry—and made fewer references to mental illness.
"What this tells us is the story we tell about our life has meaning," Drislane said. "It helps people make sense of their experiences, develop a worldview and a coherent sense of who they are. "What we're starting to see is that in psychopathy, there are traits that relate to differences in meaning-making and the ways people think about their life." The associations between word choice and traits also depended on which narrative question the participants were answering, indicating that psychopathic language is not hollow or lacking in emotion as often depicted; rather, it is context- and trait-dependent.
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