Computational Analysis of Personality and Emotion in Semi-Structured Interviews

Psychopathy is a personality disorder involving deficits in affective characteristics and behaviour (Cleckley, 1988; Hare, 2003). Previous studies have found relationships between psychopathy and negative polarity in text, as well as psychopathy and specific semantic content (e.g., Body, Family) (Garcia & Sikström, 2014; Hancock, Woodworth, & Porter, 2013; Sumner, Byers, Boochever, & Park, 2012). The majority of these studies were performed with non-clinical psychopathy (from the general population), and the only study on clinical psychopathy (from institutionalized populations) failed to find support for a relationship between overall psychopathy and negative polarity (Hancock et al., 2013). The current study explores emotion and semantic categories in further detail with both a non-clinical and a clinical sample. Findings were inconsistent with the majority of previous research, suggesting that linguistic correlates of psychopathy are variable. The prevalence of such correlates is possibly dependent on sample size and text source.