Psychopathic traits can be difficult to spot because people who have them may be adept at concealing them. However, a new study suggests their language may reveal subtle clues.
After examining more than 1,200 autobiographical accounts, researchers identified distinct patterns, including fewer references to fear and more negative descriptions of otherwise positive memories.
Participants with higher levels of boldness—a trait associated with fearlessness and confidence—used fewer anxiety-related terms, including “fear,” “afraid” and “worry.” They also referred less often to mental illness.
Those with greater disinhibition, which reflects difficulty controlling impulses, used more negative language when discussing the happiest or most significant turning points in their lives.
They also used fewer positive terms overall and made fewer references to friendship and personal achievement.
By contrast, people scoring higher in meanness—a trait linked to reduced empathy—used more positive language and more words associated with achievement and rewards.
Yet when they described major turning points, they used fewer terms connected to negative emotions.
Laura Drislane, a University of Mississippi researcher, said: “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.”
Researchers found that psychopathic traits may be reflected in the language people use to describe their personal experiences.
The three characteristics are part of the Triarchic Model of Psychopathy, which views psychopathy as a combination of personality dimensions rather than a single, fixed category.
University of Mississippi researchers Ky Bray and Drislane, an assistant professor of psychology, studied 451 people: 307 college students and 144 adults who said they had previously been incarcerated.
Each participant was asked to write about a high point, a low point and a turning point in their life. They also completed a questionnaire designed to measure psychopathic traits.
Text-analysis software then identified words linked to categories including positive and negative emotions, achievement, social confidence and risk.
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The results challenge the idea that people with psychopathic traits always communicate in cold or emotionless language. Instead, their word choices differed according to both the specific trait involved and the experience being described.
“People tend to think of psychopathy as one thing, but it’s actually multidimensional,” Bray said.
“What we mean when we say that is everyone exists on this spectrum. Everyone has some degree of meanness, boldness and disinhibition.
“Viewing it from a multidimensional perspective allows us to observe how those traits might manifest in nonforensic populations, in people who have not committed a crime.
“That allows us to see how these traits affect college students, business professionals or interpersonal relationships.”
Focusing on individual traits may help researchers understand differences in behavior and relationships that could be hidden by applying one broad label.
“That’s in part why there’s a movement away from calling people ‘psychopaths,’ because we don’t view psychopathy as a category,” Drislane said.
‘But psychopathic dimensions can predict important outcomes, things like crime, recidivism or intimate partner violence.
‘What our research, including this paper, suggests is that it’s important to look beyond that label and into the different components or dimensions of psychopathy, because each of those dimensions actually has a unique set of outcomes or things that it can predict.’
The researchers hope that a clearer understanding of these traits could eventually inform efforts to address them and understand how they develop.
‘If we want to be able to treat or ideally even prevent psychopathy from developing, we need to understand the mechanisms at play,’ she said.
‘That comes down to understanding the unique contributors for all three of these dimensions.’
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