Two Approaches to Parsing the Heterogeneity of Psychopathy.

Abstract

High crime rates, growing jail populations, and the escalating costs of incarceration have placed pressure on researchers and clinicians to better understand persistent criminal offenders (Beck & Gilliard, 1995). One such group of particular interest to forensic psychologists is psychopathic individuals. To date, there exists a significant body of literature suggesting that this group engages in a wide variety of antisocial acts and demonstrates limited change following rehabilitative interventions (Hart & Hare, 1997; Hart, 1998). As a result, psychopathic individuals represent a large cost to society, and psychologists are interested in finding effective interventions to manage their problematic behaviors. In this paper, we suggest that psychologists focus on more specific manifestations and etiologies of psychopathy in order to develop effective interventions. We believe that such a focus would involve (a) questioning the assumption that psychopathy (as measured by Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist-Revised; PCL-R; 1991) is an etiologically homogeneous entity, (b) identifying etiologically distinct variants of PCL-R psychopathy for study, and (c) specifying etiological mechanisms that may suggest tangible treatment targets. We also discuss two different, but compatible, methods we believe may be helpful in identifying etiological variants of PCL-R psychopathy: (a) using general personality theory to identify maladaptive traits that may produce psychopathic behavior and (b) identifying specific bio-psychological deficits capable of accounting for psychopathic behavior.