Superficiality in forensic psychiatric patients is related to superior phonological, semantic and syntactic skills

Psychopaths are reported to have unusual language processing, and they have been suggested to have better phonological awareness than do non-psychopaths. Phonological processing skills have not been studied among psychopathic persons, and it is unclear how the degree of psychopathy is related to such skills.

One aim of the present study was to investigate this relationship. An additional aim was to investigate how affective-interpersonal traits and antisocial lifestyle of psychopaths are related to verbal skills such as reading and spelling, as well as to phonological processing skills.

Forty (80% male) forensic psychiatric patients participated. They were all Swedish speaking and their mean age was 36 years. The patients performed reading and spelling tests as well as a battery of tasks assessing phonological processing. The patients were also assessed using the Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (PCL:SV).

The patients' scores on Factor 1 (affective and interpersonal traits) of the PCL:SV were significantly positively correlated with results on decoding of sentences and reading speed tests as well as with phonological processing skills. However, the only item that was significantly related to phonological processing skills as well as semantic and syntactic skills was Superficial.

In general, psychopaths easily shift conversational topics, and it may be due to a certain cognitive skill such as rapid automatized naming. We suggest that further studies focus on rapid automatized naming in psychopaths to clarify whether their superficial character might be related to rapid naming.