An examination of the Psychopathic Personality Inventory's nomological network: A meta-analytic review.

Abstract

Since its publication, the Psychopathic Personality Inventory and its revision (Lilienfeld & Andrews, 1996; Lilienfeld & Widows, 2005) have become increasingly popular such that it is now among the most frequently used self-report inventories for the assessment of psychopathy. The current meta-analysis examined the relations between the two PPI factors (factor 1: Fearless Dominance; factor 2: Self-Centered Impulsivity), as well as their relations with other validated measures of psychopathy, internalizing and externalizing forms of psychopathology, general personality traits, and antisocial personality disorder symptoms. Across 61 samples reported in 49 publications, we found support for the convergent and criterion validity of both PPI factor 2 and the PPI total score. Much weaker validation was found for PPI factor 1, which manifested limited convergent validity and a pattern of correlations with central criterion variables that was inconsistent with many conceptualizations of psychopathy.

The inverse relation between psychopathy and faking good: not response bias, but true variance in psychopathic personality

“…At the same time, the possibility to assess psychopathy through self-report is contested. First, several psychopathy features (e.g., shallow affect, lack of empathy, grandiose sense of self-worth) are likely to hinder accurate reflection of one owns behavior (Lilienfeld, 1998, but see Miller & Lynam, 2011). Second, it is questioned to what extent self-report measures of psychopathy are able to assess the affective and interpersonal features of psychopathy (Hare, 1985).…”

Adaptive Psychopathy: The Quarantine Vector and Attachment

“…As was expected, participants' Discomfort with Closeness evidenced directionality, with participants reporting a trend of less discomfort for close loved ones, after induction, and increasing discomfort in closeness with moral deviants. By contrast, psychopathy induction resulted in people seeing relationships with the close loved ones as more secondary [43][44][45][46][47]. Further, overall, in a strong directional effect, participants saw their relationships with others, as secondary for members of the community, with a steep increase in their sense of relationships as secondary for moral deviants, post induction.…”

Adaptive Psychopathy: The Quarantine Vector and Psychopathy Induction

“…Disinhibition by contrast reflects the now-available behavioral choices when decision making draws upon the psychopathic modular mind-and thus, occurs for quarantined, objectified targets. In this context 'impulse-control failure' , which is language of prior psychopathy theory [21], is not appropriate language. Instead, it seems that restraints upon psychopathic impulses are released in order to execute survival-based decision making.…”

“…In our recent review, the debate about earlier controversial findings [20,21] was cited, with focus upon Boldness deferred for future work. There are hypothesized conditions predicted to elicit elevations of Boldness, with effects subsumed under an interaction term.…”

“…Limitations of prior theory were apparent in its lack of explanatory power to account for affect, behavior and thinking about people with subclinical levels of psychopathy. Prior theory [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] also failed to extend ideas about amorality, immorality or deficient morality for subclinical collective psychopathy. Prior theory noted deficient, disordered morality, amorality, or moral incapacitation, for clinical high-end psychopathy, without tracing where or how to arrive at a point of joining with ideas about the same moral processes in populations holding normal-range psychopathy.…”