Psychopaths aren’t that easy to spot. Those with a taste for committing violence against others are often extremely intelligent people, and on the face of it they will come across as being friendly, you might even say charming, the first time you meet them.

There’s just no telling who is a psycho and who isn’t, other than going with your gut instincts. But as we know, this is hardly a foolproof method of avoiding getting hacked into pieces. So is there a better way to tell the Prince Charming’s apart from the Hannibal Lecters?

Well, there might just be, if you’re prepared to study someone’s tweets and the language they use in them. According to the boffins at London’s Online Privacy Foundation, it might be possible to identify certain personality traits from someone’s choice of words, and the best platform on which to apply this is Twitter.

Apparently, those who swear often, or regularly use words such as “die”, “kill”, “bury” and other aggressive phrases, are not quite right in the head.

Most people have read a person’s social media posts at some point and wondered about their mental state, and it’s precisely because of this that computer science professor Taghi Khoshoftaar and doctoral student Randall Wald decided to investigate things further.

The pair set out to see if they could apply existing psychological formulas to people’s writing and determine whether or not they had psychopathic traits. To do so, they developed a computer program to scan the tweets of almost 3,000 volunteers, who also filled in a questionnaire specially prepared by the scientists. Their results showed that 42 of those volunteers, or 1.4% of them, displayed psychopathic tendencies.

Admittedly, accusing someone of being a psycho just because of something they’ve said on Twitter is probably a little premature, and the scientists are the first to admit that their findings are not exactly, well, scientific:

‘It is not enough to send in the SWAT team because someone is highly rated on this,” admitted Wald.

But as a bit of a loud-mouth myself, I can’t help thinking that there might be something to it. While words like “die” and “bury” have become fairly commonplace, there’s no disguising their true meaning – let’s face it, no matter what context they’re used in, there’s almost always a less ‘aggressive’ term that could be used.

So the next time you come across someone cussing you out and using lots of negative phrases on Facebook or Twitter, maybe you should be afraid. Maybe you should be very afraid…