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

Abstract

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