Care to Share: Emotional Language Use as a Function of Psychopathic Traits in Violent Youth Offenders

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by interpersonal, affective, behavioural, and antisocial characteristics. Notably, a lack of empathy and perceived deficits in emotion. As language is considered to be a habitual and reliable way in which emotion is expressed (Tausczik & Pennebaker, 2010), assessing emotional language use as a function of psychopathic traits can highlight differences in how emotion-related words are used by this population. In a sample of male incarcerated violent youth offenders assessed for psychopathy using the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (Forth et al., 2003), the frequency, intensity, and polarity of emotion-related words and disfluencies in speech were explored using linguistic analysis software SEANCE (Crossley et al., 2017). Using both dimensional and categorical conceptualizations of psychopathy, more psychopathic traits were significantly associated with an increased frequency of emotion-related language and a lower use of filled pauses in speech. Results are contrary to emotion-deficit hypotheses of psychopathy, warranting further exploration into the verbal expression of emotions as representing interpersonal processes versus affective deficits.