Killer stance An investigation of the relationship between attitudinal resources and psychological traits in the writings of four serial murderers

individual’s set of psychological traits, or their psychopathology,impacts how they experience the world around them, and language offers resourcesthat allow for that experience to be shared with and communicated to someoneelse. That language can then be analyzed for patterns and their connectionsto the psychological traits. In a forensic context, such connections may givevaluable insights. There already exist psychological and linguistic approachesto the analysis of forensic texts, but the psychological approach largely lacksgrounding in linguistic theory and the linguistic approach does not typically allowconsideration of psychological characteristics. What this paper aims to provideis a step toward bridging that gap. In this paper we examine the system ofattitude from the Appraisal framework developed by Martin and White (2005) andadapted by Gales (2010) and Hurt (2020) applying this to the writings of four serialmurderers with documented mental health diagnoses. Significant patterns in theattitudinal resources were identified quantitatively and examined qualitativelythrough the lens of the psychological traits that comprised the authors’ diagnosesto determine if there was a relationship between them. Despite the obviouslimitation presented by the sample size, the results of this study suggest theapproach presented in this paper warrants further investigation.