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

Abstract

Psychopathy involves a series of specific cognitive, social and emotional features which make the psychopath different from the general population; the two most significant characteristics are extreme selfishness and deep emotional deficit that is reflected in apathy. Notably, psychopaths are skilled communicators who that use language to lie. As there has been little examination of the speech associated specifically 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 profile 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.