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"They Understand the Lyrics, but Not the Music": Differences in Prosodic Output across Psychopathic Subtypes

This person-centered analytic approach identifies homogeneous offender subtypes in terms of psychopathic trait profiles and facilitates examination of correlates that may be linked with specific subtypes. Prosody is an external correlate that contains a wealth of information relevant to disruptions in cognition and affect and may offer novel insight into different psychopathic subtypes. The current study examined prosodic output in a male offender sample (n = 469) within the context of the clinical Psychopathy Checklist – Revised interview (PCL-R; Hare, 2003). Audio recorded speech samples were drawn from offender responses to affectively-charged PCL-R interview questions representing differing levels of valence and arousal. Generally consistent with previous literature, LPA results indicated that a four-class solution yielded the best model fit for the allocation of individual cases to subtypes with high overall classification accuracy (85%). Results of external validation analyses using mixed effects multivariate analysis of variance revealed significant two- and three-way interactions (psychopathy subtype x valence x arousal) for both speech production and variability indices that helped differentiate the subtypes. Overall, the current study suggests that meaningful differences exist in terms of prosodic output within psychopathic offender subtypes, which may be related to dysfunction in underlying affective processes. Implications of these findings and future directions for research are discussed.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:unt.edu/info:ark/67531/metadc1833421
Date08 1900
CreatorsWalsh, Hannah C
ContributorsNeumann, Craig S, Callahan, Jennifer, Ryals, Anthony
PublisherUniversity of North Texas
Source SetsUniversity of North Texas
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis or Dissertation
Formatvii, 105 pages, Text
RightsPublic, Walsh, Hannah C, Copyright, Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights Reserved.

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