A Latent Class Analysis of Psychopathic Traits in Civil Psychiatric Patients: The Role of Criminal Behaviour, Violence, and Gender

Abstract

This study aimed to determine whether distinct subgroups of psychopathic traits exist in a sample of civil psychiatric patients, using data from the MacArthur Violence Risk 16.0%), a 'low affective-interpersonal and high antisocial-lifestyle psychopathy class' (class 3; 31.3%), and a 'normative class' (class 4; 26.3%). Each of the latent classes was predicted by differing external variables. Psychopathy is not a dichotomous entity, rather it falls along a skewed continuum that is best explained by four homogenous groups that are differentially related to gender, and criminal and violent behaviour.

Latent profile analysis of psychopathic traits among homicide, general violent, property, and white-collar offenders

“…Further, similar ratings on affective and cognitive responsiveness to those noted for class 2 in the present analysis were recorded for prisoners in class 4; yet this particular group was also distinguished by moderate mean scores on egocentricity and high interpersonal manipulation (the "moderate psychopathy group"; 10.8% of inmates). A psychopathy subtype with moderate ratings on most psychopathy dimensions (the intermediate psychopathy group) was also retrieved by Dhingra et al (2015). The moderate psychopathy subtype in both the current and Dhingra et al's research, largely mirrored the shape of the probabilities recorded for the "high psychopathy group" (class 5), differing primarily in the magnitude of factor scores.…”

“…This group constituted the smallest of all classes (7.1% of prisoners), which indicates that most inmates, even those detained in maximum and medium security units, do not meet the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy 5 . High psychopathy groups were earlier extracted by Colins et al (2016) and Dhingra et al (2015); however, the class membership in the latter study amounted to 26.4%.…”

“…In order to empirically test whether meaningful variants of psychopathy can be distinguished, some recent research has utilized model-based clustering and latent profile/class analysis. This resulted in recovering two (e.g., Claes et al, 2014;Drislane et al, 2014;Lee & Salekin, 2010;Skeem, Johansson, Andershed, Kerr, & Louden, 2007;Vaughn, Edens, Howard, & Smith, 2009), three (Dembo et al, 2007;Mokros et al, 2015), four (Dhingra, Boduszek, & Kola-Palmer, 2015), five (Coid, Freestone, & Ullrich, 2012;Colins et al, 2016), or six (Falkenbach, Stern, & Creevy, 2014) subgroups of psychopathy, across criminal and noncriminal populations. To elaborate, the above cited research which recognized two variants was largely congruent with Karpman's (1948) primary and secondary psychopathy theory.…”

Psychopathic Personality Traits Model (PPTM)

“…Most interestingly, membership in high psychopathy group was comparable for all adult samples (772 US prisoners = 7.6%; 1,201 UK community adults = 5.9%; 2,080 university students = 7.4%), but not for adolescents (n = 475), who were more likely than adults to have increased ratings on all PPTS dimensions (12.4%) (Boduszek, Debowska, Sherretts, Boulton & Willmott, 2017a). High psychopathy groups were earlier extracted, among others, by Colins et al (2016) and Dhingra, Boduszek, and Kola (2015); however, the class membership in the latter study amounted to 26.4%. Dhingra et al profiled respondents using a behavioral measure of psychopathy (the Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version [PCL:SV; Hart, Cox, & Hare, 1995) and hence the current results are not directly comparable with this earlier research.…”

Suicide Ideation Among Male Prisoners: Preliminary Evidence That Psychopathic Traits are Indirectly Linked to Suicide Ideation Through Thwarted Interpersonal Needs

“…We further treated our participant group as a homogenous set of individuals. It may be the case that there are distinct subgroups of psychopathic traits (Dhingra et al, 2015) that differ in phenotypic expression, external correlates, etiology, and ability to experience PB, TB, and SI. Consequently, replication and extension of our findings are necessary.…”