Psychopathy - the heterogeneity of the construct

• Main Author: Sandvik, Asle Makoto
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English

Background Hervey Cleckley’s description of psychopathic personality detailed in his book, The Mask of Sanity (1941/1976), has strongly influenced the last seven decades of empirical research on psychopathy. Nevertheless, there has been a long ongoing discussion of what should be included in the conceptualization of the psychopathy construct. While Cleckley emphasized the emotional and interpersonal deficits, others also included antisocial behavior as a defining feature. While a tremendous amount of research has been conducted on psychopathy, there are considerable mixed and sometimes contradictory findings reported in the literature. The overall aims of this thesis were to explore possible discrepancies within the modern psychopathy construct, and to see if possible underlying heterogeneities and/or if the use of different psychopathy assessment instruments might explain some of the previous mixed findings. There exist several instruments designed to assess psychopathic personality. This multitude of instruments differs in assessment methodology (i.e. self-report, clinical assessment), as well as on the theoretical focus. In the first paper, we explored the inter-correlations between three psychopathy assessment instruments (The Psychopathy Checklist – Revised [PCL-R], The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality – Institutional Rating Scale [CAPP-IRS], and The Self- Report Psychopathy Scale – III [SRP-III]) to evaluate if the instruments conceptually assess the same psychopathic construct. In the second and the third paper we investigated the relationship between the psychopathy construct and cognitive, emotional and physiological external correlates. The second papers investigated the relationship between psychopathy and Theory of Mind capabilities. The inclusion of both self-report (SRP-III) and a clinical assessment (PCL-R) of psychopathy also allowed us to investigate whether methodological differences affected the results, and hence explain some of the previous mixed findings in the field. Several previous studies have shown associations between psychopathy and the experience of negative affectivity. We wanted to further examine this relationship, and to better understand how potential underlying mechanisms affect the relationship, we also controlled for other known biological and cognitive correlates of negative affectivity. Methods Ninety-two male prison inmates at Bergen prison, Norway participated in the study. Psychopathic personal