Psychopathy and verbal indicators of deception in offenders

Abstract

Although psychopathic offenders frequently lie and manipulate others, it is unclear what strategies they use and whether there are differences between psychopathic and non-psychopathic offenders. The present study examined the association between psychopathy and verbal indicators of deception in a sample of 45 adult male offenders. Verbal indicators of deception were assessed using Statement Validity Assessment (SVA). Psychopathic offenders provided more appropriate detail and spontaneous corrections when lying. In addition, interpersonal symptoms of psychopathy were associated with the perceived credibility of lies. Although offering limited support for SVA in a forensic context, the findings suggest that it may be necessary to attend to unique indicators of deception in psychopathic offenders.

Keywords:

• psychopathy
• verbal indicators
• deception

Acknowledgements

Funding for this study was provided by AP-LS Division 41 Grants-in-Aids awarded to the first and second authors, and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship awarded to the first author. We would like to thank Fred Cardwell in the Psychology Department, and George Howlett and Catherine Russell in the Visits and Correspondence Centre for their support and assistance with data collection. We would also like to thank Jennifer Lavoie and Jocelyn Conway for their assistance with coding the narratives. This study is based on a paper presented at the 2003 Psychology & Law Interdisciplinary Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. The same dataset was the basis for a publication by Klaver, Lee, and Hart (2007).

Notes

1. Inter-rater reliability guidelines are as follows: 0.40 and under is poor, 0.40–0.59 is fair, 0.60–0.74 is good, and 0.75 and above is excellent.

2. Kappa coefficient guidelines are as follows: 0.20 and under is poor, 0.21–0.40 is fair, 0.41–0.60 is moderate, 0.61–0.80 is substantial, and 0.81 and above is excellent.

3. For the purposes of analyses, disagreements about the items were resolved through discussion.

4. We recognize that our procedure for producing the true and false narratives may affect the external validity and generalizability of the findings, and may have differentially impacted the coding of the narratives. However, this ensured that offenders provided an accurate true and false narrative, which increased the internal validity of the study.