Contemporary study: Hancock et al. (2011), Hungry like the wolf: a word-pattern analysis of the language of psychopaths. Aim, method, results and conclusions, evaluation, and links to the individual differences area and Gould.

A description item testing method and results (AO1).

Method: a study of 52 male convicted murderers in Canadian prisons, scored for psychopathy using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) and divided into psychopaths and non-psychopaths. Each described his homicide in a free narrative, which was recorded, transcribed and analysed with two computer text-analysis tools: Wmatrix (for grammatical and semantic content) and the Dictionary of Affect in Language (DAL, for emotional tone).

Results: compared with non-psychopaths, psychopaths used more subordinating conjunctions indicating cause and effect (such as "because", "so that"), suggesting they framed the crime as the logical result of a goal; they referred more to basic physiological needs (food, drink, money) and less to higher-level social needs (family, spirituality); they used more past tense and more disfluencies ("um", "uh"), suggesting psychological detachment; and their language was less emotionally intense and pleasant.

Markers reward the PCL-R-scored murderer sample, the free-narrative interviews analysed with Wmatrix and DAL, and the key linguistic findings (more cause-and-effect words, more basic needs, more past tense and disfluencies, less emotional language).

Tests interpretation plus evaluation (AO1 and AO3).

What it tells us: psychopaths' language reflects their psychology, instrumental, goal-driven thinking (more cause-and-effect language framing the murder as a means to an end), a focus on basic material needs rather than social or emotional ones, and emotional detachment (more past tense, disfluencies, less affect). This suggests measurable linguistic markers of an individual difference (psychopathy).

Strengths: objective, computerised analysis removes researcher bias and is replicable; using the standardised PCL-R to classify psychopathy gives a reliable measure; and the findings have potential forensic application (for example, analysing statements).

Weaknesses: it is correlational, so it cannot show psychopathy causes the language patterns; the sample is narrow (male convicted murderers), limiting generalisability to other psychopaths; and the research is socially sensitive, risking stigma or misuse if linguistic profiling were applied unfairly.

A strong answer concludes that the study reveals reliable linguistic correlates of psychopathy with forensic promise, but cannot prove causation and raises ethical concerns about a socially sensitive topic. Markers reward the interpretation plus balanced evaluation, including socially sensitive research.