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Psychpaths’ sensitivity to emotional metaphors

University of British Columbia

The results of this study provide further evidence for the hypothesis that psychopaths display an insensitivity to the emotional valence of language and assist in generalizing this finding to relatively complex linguistic stimuli. Using a Q-Sort format, it was determined that psychopathic subjects not only made more mistakes then nonpsychopathic subjects when using the emotional valence of metaphors as a sorting criteria, but also that their mistakes were more likely to involve sorting errors that identified metaphors as being extreme members of the opposite valence category. This suggested that psychopaths were confident in their misidentification of emotional valence. The inclusion of a task that assessed metaphor interpretive ability ensured that these results were not due to an inability to comprehend metaphoric sentences. Further, age, years of formal education, and reading level were ruled out as potentially confounding variables. Recommendations were made for future research that examines other aspects of the psychopath's use of metaphor.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-01-30

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/3989

Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace