Timothy J. Harpur

Psychopathy and the DSM-IV criteria for antisocial personality disorder.

The Axis II Work Group of the Task Force on DSM-IV has expressed concern that antisocial personality disorder (APD) criteria are too long and cumbersome and that they focus on antisocial behaviors rather than personality traits central to traditional conceptions of psychopathy and to international criteria. We describe an alternative to the approach taken in the rev. 3rd ed. of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III-R; American Psychiatric Association, 1987), namely, the revised Psychopathy Checklist. We also discuss the multisite APD field trials designed to evaluate and compare four criteria sets: the DSM-III-R criteria, a shortened list of these criteria, the criteria for dyssocial personality disorder from the 10th ed. of the International Classification of Diseases (World Health Organization, 1990), and a 10-item criteria set for psychopathic personality disorder derived from the revised Psychopathy Checklist.

The revised Psychopathy Checklist: Reliability and factor structure.

The revised Psychopathy Checklist (PCL) is a 20-item scale scored from interview and file information. Analyses of data from 5 prison samples (N= 92 5) and 3 forensic psychiatric samples (N= 356) indicate that the revised PCL resembles its 22-item predecessor in all important respects. It has excellent psychometric properties, and it measures 2 correlated factors that were cross-validated both within and between samples. Correlations between the original PCL and the revised version approached unity for both the factors and the full scale. We conclude that the revised PCL measures the same construct as the original and that the PCL is a reliable and valid instrument for the assessment of psychopathy in male forensic populations.

The Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R)

The Psychopathy Checklist (PCL; Hare, 1980) and its revision (PCL-R; Hare, 1985a, in press) are clinical rating scales that provide researchers and clinicians with reliable and valid assessments of psychopathy. Their development was spurred largely by dissatisfactions with the ways in which other assessment procedures defined and measured psychopathy (Hare, 1980, 1985b).

Assessment of psychopathy as a function of age.

The assessment of psychopathy was examined as a function of age in 889 male prison inmates between the ages of 16 and 69. Ratings of psychopathy were made with the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL), which measures 2 correlated factors. Factor 1 describes a cluster of affective-interpersonal traits central to psychopathy. Factor 2 describes traits and behaviors associated with an unstable, unsocialized lifestyle, or social deviance. Cross-sectional analyses revealed that mean scores on Factor 1 were stable across the age-span; mean scores on Factor 2 declined with age. The prevalence of antisocial personality disorder, and, to a lesser extent of PCL-defined psychopathy, also declined with age. The results are consistent with a conceptualization of psychopathy as encompassing 2 correlated but distinct constructs. They also suggest that age-related differences in traits related to impulsivity, social deviance, and antisocial behavior are not necessarily paralleled by differences in the egocentric, manipulative, and callous traits fundamental to psychopathy.

A brain imaging (single photon emission computerized tomography) study of semantic and affective processing in psychopaths

Psychopaths have been described as human predators who use charm, intimidation, and violence to control others and to satisfy their own needs. Underlying their propensity to violate social norms and expectations is a profound lack of empathy, guilt, or remorse, affective processes that have long resisted scientific investigation. Using brain imaging technology we found that psychopaths differed from nonpsychopaths in the pattern of relative cerebral blood flow during processing of emotional words. The results were consistent with the hypothesis that there are anomalies in the way psychopaths process semantic and affective information.

Psychopathy and Language

Psychopaths ace capable of behavior so hedonistic, callous, irresponsible, and self-defeating that it is easy to conclude that they must be brain damaged, insane, or both. Indeed, the most influential book on the clinical nature of psychopaths has the title “The mask of sanity” (Cleckley, 1976). While recognizing that psychiatric and legal criteria of insanity do not apply to psychopaths, Cleckley nevertheless thought that their behavior must be the surface manifestation of a profound underlying disturbance in brain function. We will present some recent data suggesting that this “disturbance” is related to the way in which language is processed, organized, and understood by psychopaths, and to a possible dissociation between the semantic and affective components of language.

Chapter 22 Psychopathy and Attention

Psychopathy is a baffling disorder characterized by the callous and remorseless use of others and by a persistent pattern of socially deviant and harmful behavior. There is increasing interest in the role that attentional processes play in the development and maintenance of the disorder. We review evidence concerned with several related hypotheses about psychopathy and attention: that psychopaths make effective use of active coping mechanisms to deal with disturbing stimulation; that they tend to overfocus attention on stimuli and events that interest them; that they have a dominant response set for reward; and that they have reduced attentional capacity. Although relatively sparse, the available evidence lends some support to the over-focussing hypothesis. We argue that our understanding of the disorder will benefit from research derived from an information processing perspective.

Weak data, strong conclusions: Some comments on Howard, Bailey and Newman's use of the psychopathy checklist

Abstract In a recent paper Howard, Bailey and Newman described their experiences with a 15-item version of Hares research scale for the assessment of psychopathy. They administered the checklist and several MMPI-derived scales to 50 consecutive admissions to Broadmoor Hospital. Psychiatric diagnoses were used to assign the patients to one of four clinical groups: Schizophrenic, Personality Disorder, Mixed and Affective Disorder. They reported that the Psychopathy Checklist was far better than the MMPI variables in discriminating among groups, but that it lacked clinical specificity because half of the schizophrenics were misclassified as ‘psychopaths’. However, we argue that serious methodological problems, including the use of poorly defined and inadequate criterion groups, make it impossible to draw any useful conclusions from the study.