By analyzing stories written by students from Cornell and the University of British Columbia, and looking at how the text people generate using social media relates to scores on the Self-Report Psychopathy scale. The researchers are interested in analyzing what people write on Facebook or in other social media, since our unconscious mind also holds sway over what we write. Their analysis revealed that psychopaths used about twice as many words related to basic physiological needs and self-preservation, including eating, drinking and monetary resources than the nonpsychopaths, they write.Д«y comparison, the nonpsychopathic murderers talked more about spirituality and religion and family, reflecting what nonpsychopathic people would think about when they just committed a murder, Hancock said. 'This pattern suggested that psychopaths were more likely to view the crime as the logical outcome of a plan (something that 'had' to be done to achieve a goal),' the authors write.ДЄnd finally, while most of us respond to higher-level needs, such as family, religion or spirituality, and self-esteem, psychopaths remain occupied with those needs associated with a more basic existence. These words, including 'because' and 'so that,' are associated with cause-and-effect statements. Psychopaths appear to view the world and others instrumentally, as theirs for the taking, the team, which also included Stephen Porter from the University of British Columbia, wrote.ДЄs they expected, the psychopaths' language contained more words known as subordinating conjunctions. With regard to psychopaths, 'We think the 'uhs' and 'ums' are about putting the mask of sanity on,' Hancock told LiveScience. Nearly universal in speech, dysfluencies indicate that the speaker needs some time to think about what they are saying. They also found more dysfluencies - the 'uhs' and 'ums' that interrupt speech - among psychopaths. The use of the past tense can be an indicator of psychological detachment, and the researchers found that the psychopaths used it more than the present tense when compared with the nonpsychopaths.

To examine the emotional content of the murderers' speech, Hancock and his colleagues looked at a number of factors, including how frequently they described their crimes using the past tense. While there are reasons to suspect that psychopaths' speech patterns might have distinctive characteristics, there has been little study of it, the team writes. 'You can spend two or three hours and come out feeling like you are hypnotized.'

'The beautiful thing about them is they are unconsciously produced,' Hancock said. 17) in Midtown Manhattan at Cornell's ILR Conference Center.

While we all have conscious control over some words we use, particularly nouns and verbs, this is not the case for the majority of the words we use, including little, functional words like 'to' and 'the' or the tense we use for our verbs, according to Jeffrey Hancock, the lead researcher and an associate professor in communications at Cornell University, who discussed the work on Monday (Oct. Using computer programs to analyze what the men said, the researchers found that those with psychopathic scores showed a lack of emotion, spoke in terms of cause-and-effect when describing their crimes, and focused their attention on basic needs, such as food, drink and money. The researchers interviewed 52 convicted murderers, 14 of them ranked as psychopaths according to the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, a 20-item assessment, and asked them to describe their crimes in detail.

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