Psychopathy is not one simple personality type. Different traits were linked with different patterns of language.
Psychopathy is often shown in movies and television as a simple personality type: cold, fearless and without much emotion.
Psychology paints a more complicated picture because psychopathic traits can vary from person to person.
A new analysis looked at whether those traits appear in the language people use when telling stories about their lives.
The results suggest that different traits are linked with different language patterns, and those patterns can change with the experience being described.
Psychopathy has three dimensions
The work used the triarchic model of psychopathy, which separates psychopathic traits into boldness, meanness and disinhibition.
Boldness includes fearlessness and social confidence. Meanness includes low empathy and aggression, while disinhibition involves poor impulse control and difficulty controlling behavior.
Ky Bray is a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Mississippi. Laura Drislane is an assistant professor of psychology there.
“People tend to think of psychopathy as one thing, but it’s actually multidimensional. What we mean when we say that is everyone exists on this spectrum. Everyone has some degree of meanness, boldness and disinhibition,” Bray said.
Personal stories show differences
The final analysis included 451 people: 307 students and 144 adults who had previously been incarcerated.
Participants completed the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure, a questionnaire that gives separate scores for boldness, meanness and disinhibition. They also wrote about a high point, a low point and a turning point in their lives.
The researchers used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, or LIWC, to examine the writing.
The software counts how often words fall into categories such as positive emotion, negative emotion, anxiety, achievement, family, friends, mental health and substance use.
“What this tells us is the story we tell about our life has meaning. It helps people make sense of their experiences, develop a worldview and a coherent sense of who they are,” Drislane said.
“What we’re starting to see is that in psychopathy, there are traits that relate to differences in meaning-making and the ways people think about their life.”
Story type changes language
The kind of story had a strong effect on the language people used.
High-point stories contained much more positive language than turning-point stories, while low-point stories contained much more negative language.
This mattered because the researchers were not looking for one fixed style of “psychopathic language.” They wanted to know whether links between traits and word choices changed across different life events.
“The goal here is not to diagnose psychopathy based on language. It’s to point to the fact that psychopathy shows up in everyday behaviors, even subtle behaviors like language,” Bray said.
“If we want to understand psychopathy and the different traits that comprise it, we need to think creatively about how these traits shape social interaction.”
Boldness links to anxiety
People with higher boldness scores used fewer anxiety-related words in their stories. They also made fewer references to mental illness.
That fits with boldness in the model, which includes lower sensitivity to threats and greater resilience to stress.
Still, word counts do not show exactly what a person felt because language categories are only indirect signs of thoughts or emotions.
Meanness reveals unexpected patterns
The results for meanness did not fully match what the researchers expected.
Higher meanness was linked with more positive-emotion and achievement language, even though the team had expected less positive emotional language.
Higher meanness was also linked with less negative emotional tone when people described turning points. This does not fit a simple picture of meanness producing emotionless language.
“Viewing it from a multidimensional perspective allows us to observe how those traits might manifest in nonforensic populations, in people who have not committed a crime,” Bray said.
“That allows us to see how these traits affect college students, business professionals or interpersonal relationships.”
Disinhibition changes with context
Disinhibition showed the strongest overall links with language. Higher scores were associated with more negative emotional tone, less positive tone and fewer references to achievement.
The pattern changed with the story. Higher disinhibition was linked with more negative tone in high-point and turning-point stories, but not in low-point stories.
Its link with substance-related words also changed depending on the narrative. This means the results do not support one simple pattern of more negative language in every situation.
Traits matter beyond labels
The findings help show why the researchers look at separate traits instead of placing people into one category. A person can score higher or lower on each dimension, and each dimension can show a different pattern.
“That’s in part why there’s a movement away from calling people ‘psychopaths,’ because we don’t view psychopathy as a category,” Drislane said.
“But psychopathic dimensions can predict important outcomes, things like crime, recidivism or intimate partner violence.
“What our research, including this paper, suggests is that it’s important to look beyond that label and into the different components or dimensions of psychopathy, because each of those dimensions actually has a unique set of outcomes or things that it can predicts.”
Recidivism means returning to criminal behavior after an earlier offense. The study itself did not test crime, violence or future behavior, but Drislane used those examples to explain why the dimensions matter.
Language cannot diagnose psychopathy
The researchers make an important distinction between finding patterns in a group and identifying an individual person.
LIWC can show links between word categories and personality scores, but it cannot diagnose psychopathy from a piece of writing.
The results also came from written answers to specific questions about personal life events.
They should not be treated as a universal language pattern that appears in every conversation or every person with higher psychopathic traits.
Why each psychopathic trait matters
“If we want to be able to treat or ideally even prevent psychopathy from developing, we need to understand the mechanisms at play,” Drislane said.
“That comes down to understanding the unique contributors for all three of these dimensions.”
The findings suggest that psychopathy cannot be understood through a single personality label or recognizable pattern of language.
Each dimension shapes how people describe their experiences in different ways, offering researchers a more detailed picture of how psychopathic traits influence everyday behavior.
The study is published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
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