Due to their often duplicitous nature, it can be hard to identify a psychopath.
But a new study suggests looking at a woman’s head movement during a conversation could be a giveaway.
Using head tracking algorithms, experts in New Mexico analysed recordings of women being interviewed by police.
They found that the biggest psychopaths kept their head very still, just like men.
A stationary stance may be a tactic employed by psychopaths to hide potential clues about their personality or intentions given away by body language.
The new study – which claims to be the first linking women psychopaths and nonverbal communication – was led by researchers at the University of New Mexico’s Department of Psychology in Albuquerque.
‘Nonverbal behaviors (i.e., head dynamics) represent an important, yet understudied, form of communication that may enhance 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 scoring high on psychopathy, specifically, exhibiting more stationary head positioning during clinical interview administration.’
Generally, people who are described as psychopaths show traits such as antisocial behaviour, untruthfulness, irresponsibility and lack of remorse or empathy.
Already, studies have shown psychopathic men have ‘unique patterns of nonverbal communication’, including more fixed head positions during clinical interviews.
However, it has been unclear whether ‘similar patterns of head dynamics’ are also displayed by women who score high on psychopathic traits.
For the study, the researchers used an image processing and machine learning tool to automatically extract head movement from recorded interviews of 213 incarcerated women in the US.
The women were informed their interviews and other data would be ‘videotaped for data quality purposes and possible use in future analyses’.
In each interview, the tool was used to asses the average head position for the whole session as well as head position in each frame.
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, PCL-R scores a person from one to 40 – and anyone who scores 30 or over in the US is deemed a psychopath.
The PCL-R is ‘validated for use among incarcerated women’ as well as incarcerated men, the team say.
As expected, the researchers found that the lower the level of head movement, the higher inmates scored in the psychopathy assessment.
Because psychopathy is ‘highly predictive of future re-offending’ in both women and men, the findings could be important for prison officers.
In police interviews, female inmates who keep their head more still could be more likely to reoffend – although proving this would require further study.
A limitation of the study is participants were solely inmates, so the team do not know how much ‘the prison environment may have influenced participants’ behaviour’.
‘Capturing nonverbal communication cues, such as head dynamics, in a research setting may not necessarily mirror those demonstrated during day-to-day interactions,’ they say in their paper, in Personality and Individual Differences.
Further studies may also look at whether minimal head movements among women is a trait among psychopaths outside of prison.
It comes shortly after a British researcher warned that more women are psychopaths than commonly thought.
Dr Clive Boddy at Anglia Ruskin University said signs of psychopathy in women are different to men and can come in the form of sexually seductive and manipulative behaviour.
Current scientific evidence suggests that male psychopaths outnumber females by around six to one.
But Dr Boddy thinks the real ratio of male to female psychopathy is about 1.2 to one – up to five times higher than previously suggested.
The authors of the new study seem to acknowledge this, saying attempts at manipulation by psychopaths may resemble conning behaviour if coming from men, but flirtatious behaviour if from women.
