Inside Cornell: Analyzing the words of psychopaths – YouTube

Inside Cornell: Analyzing the words of psychopaths – YouTube

A very interesting talk on the results of analysis of the differences in the language used by Psychopaths and non Psychopaths who had committed murder (and have been incarcerated). Very interestingly it seems that when asked to talk about the murder event the psychopathic subjects were more concerned with what they ate or drank on the day of the event than those who did not meet the criteria.

Most saliently we use language in an interesting way, some of the language we use is fairly considered, nouns and verbs are chosen fairly deliberately, but functional language (if, and , the, them, here, there) and language concerning time or tense (then, was, are, is) are not as deliberately chosen and so display information about the state and intention of the subject. Also we can derive certain information from the type and frequency of disfluencies (um, uh, hmm) when used in language. This talk doesn’t disregard the already known aspects of language (distancing, allocation of responsibility, display of emotional state and so on).

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