8 Ways To Tell If You're A Psychopath

2. Do You Speak Like A Psychopath?

Many psychopaths can blend almost seamlessly into society, playing by normal social rules and using their charm to manipulate. However, they do have some "tells", and researchers at Cornell University figured out one of them by analysing their speech patterns.

The researchers interviewed 52 convicted murderers, 14 of which were diagnosed psychopaths, and then fed their responses into a computer for analysis.

They found that psychopathic killers have a few distinguishing traits in their speech that non-psychopathic killers lack. Because the psychopaths have no emotional response to the crimes they commit, they tend to speak about them in a much more detached manner, often describing them in the past tense. They also used a lot more "dysfluencies" - words like "um", "uh" and "like" - which researchers think could be fore the purpose of trying to make themselves sound more "normal".

They also found that psychopaths had a higher use of subordinating conjunctions. These are words like "so" and "because", which indicate that they think of their crimes as logical cause-and-effect affairs.

Non-psychopaths are also much more likely to talk about or even justify their actions with "higher levels of need" such as family and self-esteem, whereas psychopaths tend to stick to the more primal needs for resources such as food or money.