Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Psychopaths have long been associated with a unique abilityto manipulate others (Hare, 1999). According to the“bottleneck” hypothesis of psychopathy (Newman & Baskin-Sommers, 2012), psychopaths’ cognitive abilities are directlyrelated to goal-directed behavior. To shed more light onlanguage production in psychopathy, two languageproduction studies were completed contrasting content andfluency under different motivational and difficulty conditions.Individuals high in psychopathy (HP) were less fluent butmaintained a more complex lexicon than their lowpsychopathy (LP) counterparts when under high cognitiveload and low motivation. Yet when HP individuals were underlow cognitive load and high motivation, they were morefluent, but used a less complex lexicon. Furthermore, the HPgroup produced more emotional language in both conditions.The results suggest that HP individuals’ language productionis inherently related to motivation and they attempt to balancefluency and complexity when cognitive load is increased.