How to find out if a woman is a psychopath is obvious, experts say

She could be a real head case.

Want to know the difference between a woman with a not-so-great personality and a complete psychopath?

New research reveals that women have an obvious cue to separate the sweet and sour from the psychotic, whether they move their heads when they talk.

Nonverbal behaviors (i.e., head dynamics) represent an important but understudied form of communication that may improve our ability to detect certain forms of psychopathology, including psychopathy, the study authors said from the University of New Mexico.

Using an automated detection algorithm, the research team determined that women who keep their heads perfectly still or with minimal movement while conversing have high levels of psychopathic propensity.

Here, we used an automated technique to detect, extract, and analyze head position and dynamics in relation to psychopathic traits in a sample of incarcerated women, the scientists said.

For their findings, the analysts assessed the nonverbal tendencies of 213 female inmates.

Participants were between the ages of 21 and 57 and were held in a medium- and maximum-security correctional facility in the US.

The researchers defined psychopathic traits as a combination of interpersonal dysfunctions such as manipulation, pathological lying, callousness, lack of remorse, impulsivity, irresponsibility, and criminal versatility.

The researchers observed videotaped interviews of each woman in the study.

Head position was extracted frame by frame [the] interviews, the authors explained.

Average head position (AHP) was calculated using the spatial information of all extracted frames.

Head positions in each shot were classified into one of three identified motion partitions: minimal, moderate, and extreme motion.

The less movement, the more psychopathic.

The research also included an examination of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, a common assessment developed in the 1970s by Canadian psychologist Robert D. Hare.

The 20-item list measured participants’ antisocial tendencies from 1 to 40, the lower the score, the better. People who earn a score of 30 or more are considered psychopathic.

The boys aren’t clear that the strange findings line up with previous studies of incarcerated men, which found that men who keep their noggins are often also psychotic.

But surprisingly, wolves are more common than most would think.

Clive Boddy, a professor at Anglia Ruskin University who specializes in corporate psychopathy, recently suggested that female psychopaths probably go unnoticed because of societal gender bias.

Julie Aitken Schermer, professor of psychology at Western University in London, Ontario, posits that men are often more openly crazy.

In a recent report, he suggested that guys with inexplicable affinities for their obnoxiously loud and clunky cars are much more likely to be certifiable.

Desire for a loud car with a modified muffler, Schermer wrote, predicted being male and higher scores on psychopathy and sadism.