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.

The Language of Deception: Applying Findings on Opinion Spam to Legal and Forensic Discourses

“…In addition to this, there are semantic vector space models which serve to characterize each word via a real-valued vector, determined using the distance or angle between pairs of word vectors (Sebastiani 2002). In the field of automatic fraudulent text detection, various approaches have been applied, mostly relying on linguistic features, such as n-grams (Fornaciari and Poesio 2013;Mihalcea and Strapparava 2009;Ott et al 2011), discourse structure (Rubin and Vashchilko 2012;Santos and Li 2009), semantically related keyword lists (Burgoon et al 2003;Pérez-Rosas et al 2015), measures of syntactic complexity (Pérez-Rosas et al 2015), stylometric features (Burgoon et al 2003), psychologically motivated keyword lists (Almela et al 2015), and parts of speech (Fornaciari and Poesio 2014;Li et al 2014).…”