Shadowing Practice: PSYCHOPATH vs SOCIOPATH - Learn English Speaking with Video
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You've almost certainly met a psychopath.
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Statistically, you've probably met several.
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And here's the uncomfortable part.
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You probably liked them.
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Most people imagine a psychopath as a killer in a horror movie, and a sociopath as more or less the same thing with a different name.
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Both ideas are wrong.
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These are two different kinds of people, with different brains, different childhoods, and very different ways of being dangerous.
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By the end of this video, you'll know exactly what separates them, why one is far harder to spot than the other,
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and the one question that protects you from both.
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But first, there's something almost nobody knows.
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Neither one is an official diagnosis.
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If you open the manual psychiatrists use to diagnose mental disorders, you won't find psychopath or sociopath.
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The closest diagnosis is called antisocial personality disorder.
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It describes a long pattern of ignoring other people's rights.
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Lying, breaking rules, acting on impulse, and feeling little guilt about any of it.
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Researchers still use the word psychopathy, though, and they measure it carefully.
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The most famous tool was created by Canadian psychologist Robert Hare.
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It's called the Psychopathy Checklist, and it scores people on 20 traits, like superficial charm, pathological lying,
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lack of remorse, and a constant need for stimulation.
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Each trait gets zero, one, or two points.
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In North America, a score of 30 out of 40 is the usual cutoff for psychopathy.
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The word sociopath has a different history.
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In 1930, psychologist George Partridge used it to argue that this kind of behavior comes mainly from a person's social world, their upbringing and environment.
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So here's how most experts and writers draw the line today.
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Psychopathy is the version people seem to be born with.
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Sociopathy is the version that's mostly made.
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It's not a perfect line, and researchers still argue about it.
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But once you see the two side by side, the difference is hard to miss.
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Meet the psychopath.
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Imagine the most charming person at a party.
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Relaxed, confident, funny.
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They make eye contact and remember your name.
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Within 10 minutes, you feel like you've known them for years.
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That's often what a psychopath looks like from the outside.
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Calm.
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Controlled.
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Strangely fearless.
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That fearlessness is real, and you can measure it.
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When most people expect something bad, like an electric shock or a loud noise, their bodies react before they even think.
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Their palms sweat.
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Their startle reflex gets stronger.
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In studies, people high in psychopathy often show much weaker versions of these reactions.
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Their alarm system is turned down.
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This is why a psychopath can lie to your face without blinking.
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The nervousness that gives most liars away just isn't there.
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And when a psychopath hurts someone, it's usually not out of rage.
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It's planned.
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It's a tool.
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They wanted something, you were in the way, and they handled it the way you'd move a chair.
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Afterwards, they don't lie awake feeling guilty.
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For many of them, guilt is a word they understand, but have never really felt.
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Now, meet the sociopath.
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The sociopath is the person at the party who seems fine until something goes wrong.
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Someone spills a drink on them and suddenly they're shouting.
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They're quick to anger, quick to blame, and they struggle to keep a job, a relationship, or a plan for very long.
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Sociopaths are generally described as impulsive and erratic.
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Where a psychopath plans, a sociopath reacts.
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Their harmful behavior is often messy and emotional, done in the heat of the moment, which also makes them much easier to catch.
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Sociopaths can also form real bonds, just not many.
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They might be loyal to one friend, one family member, or one group, while caring nothing about anyone outside that circle.
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They often know what they're doing is wrong.
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They may even feel a flicker of guilt.
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They just don't let it stop them.
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So the simplest way to remember it is this.
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The psychopath is cold.
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The sociopath is hot.
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Born or made?
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So where does each one come from?
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In 2005, researchers in the UK studied thousands of seven -year -old twins.
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They looked at what psychologists call callous unemotional traits, a lack of guilt and empathy that can show up even in young children.
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They found that when these traits were strong, they were heavily influenced by genes.
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That doesn't mean a child is born doomed.
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Genes aren't destiny.
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But it suggests that for psychopathy, something is often there from very early on sociopathy tends to tell a different story
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it's more often linked to what happens to a child abuse neglect violence chaos at home a child who learns
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that the world is dangerous and
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that nobody will protect them can grow up treating everyone else
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as a threat one kind of brain may be wired differently
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from the start the other may be shaped by the world
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into something hard what's different in the brain neuroscientist kent keel wanted to see inside the brains of psychopaths
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so he did something no one had done at that scale.
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He brought a mobile brain scanner into prisons and scanned thousands of inmates.
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His team found
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that people scoring high in psychopathy tended to show differences in a network of brain regions involved in emotion and moral feeling,
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including the amygdala, the brain's alarm center.
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And then there's the strange case of James Fallon.
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Fallon was a neuroscientist who studied the brains of killers.
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One day, while looking through a set of brain scans, he noticed one that matched the pattern he associated with psychopaths.
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When he checked the name, it was his own.
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Fallon had never hurt anyone.
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He later said he believed his loving childhood was what kept him on the right side of the line.
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Whether or not he was right, his story shows something important.
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A brain is not a sentence.
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It's a starting point.
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The Empathy Switch Here's what surprises most people.
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Psychopaths are not blind to emotions.
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Many of them are very good at reading what you feel.
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Psychologists split empathy into two parts.
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Cognitive empathy is knowing what someone feels.
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Emotional empathy is feeling it with them.
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Psychopaths often have the first without the second.
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They can read your fear perfectly.
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It just doesn't move them.
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In a 2013 study in the Netherlands, researchers showed violent offenders with psychopathy videos of people's hands interacting, – sometimes lovingly, sometimes painfully.
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While they simply watched, the brain areas linked to sharing others' feelings were much less active than in other people.
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But when the researchers asked them to try to empathize with the people in the videos, that activity rose, and the gap became much smaller.
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The researchers suggested that for psychopaths, empathy may be less like something missing and more like a switch they usually leave off.
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That's what makes them so convincing.
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When charm is useful, they can switch the understanding on.
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When it isn't, they switch it off.
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Where they really are Psychopathy is often estimated at around 1 % of the general population.
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In prisons, estimates are much higher, commonly somewhere between 15 and 25%.
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But not every psychopath ends up in prison.
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Some end up in offices.
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In a 2010 study, researchers including Robert Hare assessed around 200 corporate managers and professionals.
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About 4 % scored high enough to be considered likely psychopaths, several times the rate usually estimated for the general public.
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Many of them had been rated by their companies as charismatic, creative, and good communicators.
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They were also rated poorly on teamwork and actual performance.
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That's the danger of the cold type.
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The traits that make a psychopath harmful—confidence, charm, fearlessness— are often the same traits we mistake for leadership.
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The biggest myth.
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Here's what movies get wrong.
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Most psychopaths are not serial killers, and most never kill anyone.
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Far more of them leave behind a trail of broken trust, drained bank accounts, and people wondering how they were fooled.
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And here's the second myth.
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The word psychopath gets thrown at every ex, every bad boss, every selfish friend.
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But everyone lies sometimes.
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Everyone acts selfishly sometimes.
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Someone being cruel to you does not automatically make them a psychopath.
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Only a trained professional can actually make that assessment.
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And there's real hope.
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At a juvenile treatment center in Wisconsin, a program designed specifically for young offenders with these traits was
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linked to much lower rates of violent re -offending compared with similar youths who didn't get it.
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Some of these minds can be changed especially
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when people start young the one question
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so how do you protect yourself from either one most people focus on the wrong thing
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they listen to what someone says charm apologies promises the perfect words at the perfect moment
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but words are exactly where a psychopath is strongest
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so next time someone's words make you feel amazing pause and ask yourself one question.
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What do they actually do when it costs them something?
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Do they keep promises when it's inconvenient?
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Do they treat a waiter the same way they treat you?
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When they hurt someone, do they repair it or just explain it away?
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A psychopath can fake almost any feeling.
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What's much harder to fake, for years, is consistent behavior that costs them something.
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Now tell me in the comments, before this video, which one did you think was more dangerous, the psychopath or the sociopath? And subscribe,
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because next time we're going deeper into the cold type and the exact manipulation tactics psychopaths use to make you trust them.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “PSYCHOPATH vs SOCIOPATH”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: psychopath, sociopath, brain, psychopathy, trait. This video has 147 sentences and 1579 words to shadow. The speech runs for 9:47. The speaker talks at a natural 161 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| researcher noun | /ˈɹiˌsɝ.t͡ʃɚ/ | One who researches. |
| trait noun | /tɹeɪt/ | An identifying characteristic, habit or trend. |
| empathy noun | /ˈɛmpəθi/ | Identification with or understanding of the thoughts, feelings, or emotional state of another person. |
| charm noun | /t͡ʃɑɹm/ | An object, act or words believed to have magic power (usually carries a positive connotation). |
| guilt noun | /ɡɪlt/ | Responsibility for wrongdoing. |
| psychologist noun | /ˌsaɪˈkɑl.ə.d͡ʒɪst/ | An expert in the field of psychology. |
| killer noun | /ˈkɪlɚ/ | One who or that which kills. |
| estimate noun | /ˈɛs.tɪ.mət/ | A rough calculation or assessment of the value, size, or cost of something. |
| argue verb | /ˈɑɹ.ɡju/ | To show grounds for concluding (that); to indicate, imply. |
| violent adjective | /ˈvaɪ.ə.lənt/ | Involving extreme force or motion. |
| gene noun | /d͡ʒiːn/ | A theoretical unit of heredity of living organisms which may take several values and (in principle) predetermines a precise trait of an organism's form… |
| disorder noun | /dɪsˈɔɹdɚ/ | Absence of order; state of not being arranged in an orderly manner. |
| alarm noun | /əˈlɑɹm/ | A summons to arms, as on the approach of an enemy. |
| diagnosis noun | /daɪəɡˈnəʊsɪs/ | The process of, or an instance of, identification of the nature and cause of a medical condition or illness. |
| emotion noun | /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/ | A person's internal state of being and involuntary physiological response to an object or a situation, based on or tied to physical state and sensory data. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| grow up verb | To mature and become an adult. |
| leave behind verb | To abandon. |
| leave off verb | To omit. |
| look through verb | To take a view of the contents of; search in, either with the eyes or by hand. |
| show up verb | To appear, arrive, or attend, especially suddenly or erratically. |
| turn down verb | To refuse, decline, or deny. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- You've almost certainly met a psychopath.
- Statistically, you've probably met several.
- Do they keep promises when it's inconvenient?
- Do they treat a waiter the same way they treat you?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is called · was created · be born |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | you've probably met · you've known · have never really felt |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 18 contractions and reduced forms, such as they're, you've, doesn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: empathy /ˈɛmpəθi/, myth /mɪθ/, psychopath /ˈsaɪkəʊpæθ/, sociopath /ˈsəʊ.si.ə(ʊ)ˌpæθ/, psychopathy /saɪˈkɑpəθi/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/, shock /ʃɔk/, selfish /ˈsɛlf.ɪʃ/, shout /ʃaʊt/, manipulation /məˌnɪp.juˈleɪ.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: psychologist /ˌsaɪˈkɑl.ə.d͡ʒɪst/, differently /ˈdɪf.ə.ɹənt.li/, uncomfortable /ʌnˈkʌm.fɚ.tə.bl̩/, apology /əˈpɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/, manipulation /məˌnɪp.juˈleɪ.ʃən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like researcher, trait, empathy.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.