Profiling School Shooters: Automatic Text-Based Analysis

Yair Neuman, Dan Assaf, Yochai Cohen, James L. Knoll
2015 Frontiers in Psychiatry  
2015) Profiling school shooters: automatic text-based analysis. Front. Psychiatry 6:86. School shooters present a challenge to both forensic psychiatry and law enforcement agencies. The relatively small number of school shooters, their various characteristics, and the lack of in-depth analysis of all of the shooters prior to the shooting add complexity to our understanding of this problem. In this short paper, we introduce a new methodology for automatically profiling school shooters. The
more » ... ology involves automatic analysis of texts and the production of several measures relevant for the identification of the shooters. Comparing texts written by 6 school shooters to 6056 texts written by a comparison group of male subjects, we found that the shooters' texts scored significantly higher on the Narcissistic Personality dimension as well as on the Humilated and Revengeful dimensions. Using a ranking/prioritization procedure, similar to the one used for the automatic identification of sexual predators, we provide support for the validity and relevance of the proposed methodology. Keywords: forensic psychiatry, school shooters, automatic text analysis, computational personality, natural language processing Frontiers in Psychiatry | www.frontiersin.org June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 86 Cho 1
doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2015.00086 pmid:26089804 pmcid:PMC4453266 fatcat:nthue6wmfbcbxmagr3j4z2ltvy