Assessing Antisocial and Psychopathic Personalities

Abstract

The assessment of antisocial and psychopathic personalities presents special challenges for the forensic evaluator. This chapter emphasizes use of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), Rorschach, and Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) for a comprehensive evaluation of these patients. These measures lend incremental validity to understanding these difficult patients, especially when combined with testing of intelligence and cognitive functioning. Integrating data from multiple domains is essential to answering the psycholegal and forensic treatment questions surrounding the antisocial and psychopathic patient. The forensically trained clinical psychologist is best suited to assess psychopathy, a task that historically has been overlooked or avoided in traditional mental health settings.

Validity of Rorschach Inkblot scores for discriminating psychopaths from nonpsychopaths in forensic populations: A meta-analysis.

“…Future research is necessary to determine whether the Rorschach might be valid for detecting specific factors or facets (e.g., narcissism, lack of guilt, dishonesty, poor impulse control) of the broad psychopathy syndrome. Even if this were the case, such findings would necessitate a substantial revision of Gacono and colleagues' (e.g., Gacono & Meloy, 2009) assertions, which apply to psychopathy as a whole.…”

“…Given these limitations, many authors are skeptical of using either self-report measures or interviews based largely on selfreport to assess psychopathy. As a consequence, some scholars (Gacono & Meloy, 2009;Hartmann, Nørbech, & Grønnerød, 2006;Loving & Lee, 2006) have proposed that the Rorschach Inkblot Test (Rorschach, 1921) can be especially useful for this purpose because its scores may tap more unconscious or implicit processes relevant to psychopathy (e.g., self-concept, unconscious drives). The idea that psychopathic personality traits can be de-tected with the aid of the Rorschach is more than half a century old.…”

The Relationship between the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised and the MMPI–2: A Pilot Study

“…In light of the debates about both the dimensionality and facet structure of the Pcl-R, the aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between the four-facet model of the Pcl-R and the clinical scales of the MMPI-2, as well as the anxiety scale (watson & clark, 1984;gacono & Meloy, 2002) in a forensic, culturally homogenous sample. based on hansen, et al (2007( , 2008( ), Thayer, et al (1996, and kemp, et al (2010):Hypothesis 1. facet 1 will have a negative relationship with clinical scales measuring negative affectivity (i.e., depression and anxiety).…”

Unique and shared features of narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders: Implications for assessing and modeling externalizing traits

“…Relatedly, our correlational analyses (Table ) also bear relevance to a significant body of prior work that has aimed to identify the degree to which NPD, ASPD, and related conditions such as psychopathy are differentially related to other psychopathology, personality, and related variables such as attachment (Cale & Lilienfeld, ; Gacono, Meloy & Butcher, ; Lynam & Widiger, ). The correlational analyses presented in Table provide further evidence for the overlap amongst various ASPD and NPD traits.…”