Life-story essays from 450 people tie three psychopathic traits to three distinct word patterns

Meanness produced the most interesting result. The Triarchic Model, the framework the Mississippi team worked from, defines meanness as lack of empathy, interpersonal callousness, aggressive self-promotion and exploitative behaviour ^[12]. Even so, people who scored higher on it wrote about their lives with a more positive tone, more reward-oriented vocabulary and less negative emotion ^[5]. I think the self-promotion in that definition is the likeliest link. A callous person narrating their own life may well narrate a success story.

Boldness is the least surprising of the three. The model defines it partly by emotional resilience, stress immunity and low anxiety ^[12]. Finding that bolder people wrote fewer words about anxiety, fear and worry ^[6] mostly confirms that the questionnaire and the word counts agree.

One detail of the design is good. Participants wrote about their high points, low points and major turning points before they completed the trait assessments ^[3], so the questionnaire items could not have primed the stories. Software then counted how often words fell into categories such as emotional valence, achievement and interpersonal connection ^[8].

The thing this doesn't tell you is how anyone sounds. The university's release sets the work against the stereotype that people with psychopathic traits speak with cold, emotionless detachment ^[10]. Word frequencies in written essays measure what people chose to write about. Tone of voice, pacing and flat delivery are outside what the method can see.

These are correlations between trait scores and word use ^[1]. The sample mixed university students with justice-involved adults who reported prior incarceration ^[2]. If the two groups differ both in trait scores and in the hardships their essays describe, part of the link between disinhibition and negative emotion ^[4] could reflect life circumstances. The university's account does not report effect sizes, or say whether the groups were analysed separately.

Ky Bray, the first author and a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Mississippi ^[11], drew a line on how the findings should be used. "The goal here is not to diagnose psychopathy based on language," Bray said ^[7]. "It's to point to the fact that psychopathy shows up in everyday behaviors, even subtle behaviors like language." ^[9]