Due to their often deceptive nature, it can be difficult to identify a psychopath.
But a new study suggests that watching a woman’s head move during a conversation could be a clue.
Using head-tracking algorithms, experts in New Mexico analyzed recordings of women interviewed by police.
They found that the biggest psychopaths kept their heads very still, just like men.
A stationary posture may be a tactic employed by psychopaths to hide potential clues about their personality or intentions revealed by body language.
Using head-tracking algorithms, experts in New Mexico found that female inmates with higher levels of psychopathy held their heads more stationary during police interrogations (file photo)
The new study, which claims to be the first to link psychopathic women and non-verbal communication, was led by researchers from the Department of Psychology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
“Nonverbal behaviors (i.e., brain dynamics) represent an important, yet understudied, form of communication that may improve our ability to detect certain forms of psychopathology, including psychopathy,” they say.
“We believe our results help identify a unique pattern of head dynamics characteristic of women with high psychopathy scores, specifically, who exhibit a more stationary head position during the administration of the clinical interview.”
Generally, people described as psychopaths display traits such as antisocial behavior, falsehood, irresponsibility, and a lack of remorse or empathy.
Studies have already shown that psychopathic men have “unique patterns of nonverbal communication,” including more fixed head positions during clinical interviews.
However, it has not been clear whether women with high scores on psychopathic traits also show “similar patterns of brain dynamics.”
For the study, researchers used an image processing and machine learning tool to automatically extract head movement from recorded interviews of 213 incarcerated women in the United States.
The women were debriefed about their interviews and other data would be “video recorded for data quality purposes and possible use in future analyses.”
At each interview, the tool was used to assess the average head position throughout the session, as well as the head position in each frame.
Using head-tracking algorithms, experts in New Mexico found that female inmates with higher levels of psychopathy held their heads more stationary during police interviews.
To determine levels of psychopathy, the team used a common assessment called the “Hare Psychopathy Checklist – Revised” (PCL-R), originally developed in the 1970s by Canadian psychologist Robert D. Hare.
Using a 20-item checklist, the PCL-R rates a person from one to 40, and anyone who scores 30 or higher in the US is considered a psychopath.
The PCL-R is “validated for use among incarcerated women” as well as incarcerated men, the team states.
As expected, the researchers found that the lower the level of head movement, the higher the inmates scored on the psychopathy assessment.
Since psychopathy is “highly predictive of future recidivism” in both women and men, the findings could be important for prison officials.
In police interviews, inmates who keep their heads still might be more likely to reoffend, although proving this would require more study.
One limitation of the study is that the participants were only inmates, so the team does not know to what extent “the prison environment may have influenced the participants’ behavior.”
Shown are 3D maps of a participant’s head position over the course of an entire video recording. Each dot represents the position of the participant’s head in a single frame of the video.
“Capturing nonverbal communication cues, such as head dynamics, in a research setting may not necessarily reflect those demonstrated during day-to-day interactions,” they state in their article, in Personality and individual differences.
Other studies could also look at whether minimal head movements among women are a trait among psychopaths outside of prison.
It comes shortly after a British researcher warned that there are more female psychopaths than commonly thought.
Dr Clive Boddy from Anglia Ruskin University said signs of psychopathy in women are different to those in men and can come in the form of sexually seductive and manipulative behaviour.
Current scientific evidence suggests that male psychopaths outnumber female psychopaths by approximately six to one.
But Dr Boddy believes the actual ratio of psychopathy between men and women is about 1.2 to one, up to five times higher than previously suggested.
The authors of the new study seem to recognize this, saying that manipulation attempts by psychopaths can resemble scamming behavior if they come from men, but flirtatious behavior if they come from women.