Analysing deception in a psychopath's speech: A quantitative approach

Abstract

Psychopathy involves a series of specifi c cognitive, social and emotional features which make the psychopath different from the general population; the two most signifi cant characteristics are extreme selfi shness and deep emotional defi cit that is refl ected in apathy. Notably, psychopaths are skilled communicators who that use language to lie. As there has been little examination of the speech associated specifi cally with psychopaths, especially in the Spanish language, the present study aims to contrast different veracious excerpts to others which are deceptive. The text analysis is framed within forensic computational linguistics, and complemented with some information related to the stylometric profi le of the text. The investigation shows how the parameter mainly affected by the psychological condition of the psychopath subject is the distribution of grammatical persons; in addition, some further evidence includes the frequency of certainty adverbs and verbs related to cognitive processes.