Behavior and personality assessment in men labeled adaptive sociopaths

Psychopathy Deconstructed and Reconstructed: Identifying and Assembling the Personality Building Blocks of Cleckley's Chimera

“…The fraught construct of psychopathy (Lewis, ) has long been marked by two “faces,” one primarily or exclusively unsuccessful and the other at least somewhat successful, at least with respect to short‐term interpersonal functioning (Patrick, ). These protean polarities have reappeared in changing names and guises over the past century, but they display surprising conceptual convergence: the impulsive psychopath versus the swindler psychopath (Kraepelin, ), antisocial personality disorder versus psychopathy (Lilienfeld, ), sociopathy versus psychopathy (Lykken, ; Partridge, ), secondary psychopathy versus primary psychopathy (Karpman, ; Skeem, Poythress, Edens, Lilienfeld & Cale, ), simple versus complex psychopathy (Arieti, ), unsuccessful psychopathy versus successful psychopathy (Hall & Benning, ), nonadaptive versus adaptive sociopathy (Sutker & Allain, ), and aggressive versus emotionally stable psychopathy (Hicks, Markon, Patrick, Krueger, & Newman, ). Corroborating these overlapping distinctions, cluster analyses support the existence of separable secondary and primary “subtypes” among high scorers on the PCL‐R (e.g., Blagov et al., ) and PPI (e.g., Falkenbach, Stern, & Creevy, ), although these subtypes are almost certainly densifications of multiple dimensions in multivariate space rather than genuine taxa (Edens et al., ).…”

Assessment of cognitive control in psychopathic and normal prisoners

“…Similarly, Widom (1977) found relatively fewer qualitative errors for noninstitutionalized psychopaths than for psychopaths described in earlier studies (Docter and Winder, 1954;Fooks and Thomas, 1957;Schalling and Rosen, 1968). More recently, Sutker and Allain (1983) observed that individuals who could be labeled soclopathic by Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) criteria, but were adjusting well to the rigorous demands of postgraduate education, produced significantly more errors on the qualitative Porteus index than did their so-called normal counterparts. Such findings suggest that psychopaths or sociopaths as a group may not demonstrate deficiencies in controlling impulses or in inhibiting maladaptive responding, depending upon the conditions of assessment and the types of control group comparisons.…”

Successful and unsuccessful psychopaths: A neurobiological model

“…Emotion processing deficits in both groups are indicated by the failure to recognize fearful facial expression (Iria & Barbosa, 2009), reduced emotional modulation of the startle blink response (Benning Justus & Finn, 2007) and reduced heart rate reactivity in response to aversive stimuli (Benning et al, 2005;Justus & Finn, 2007;Osumi et al, 2007). The autonomic hypoarousal (low resting heart rate) observed in both groups (Ishikawa et al, 2001) is viewed as driving a sensation-seeking personality (Sutker & Allain, 1983). Behavioral modulation deficits that reflect self-regulation and impulsivity are also common to both groups (Belmore & Quinsey, 1994;Lynam et al, 1999;Wilkowski & Robinson, 2008).…”

“…In contrast, although studies on college students have allowed researchers to select a convenient sample with elevated psychopathic traits and higher statistical power, this approach also has significant limitations. First, except for one study (Sutker & Allain, 1983), no selfreport crime or official criminal record has been collected on participants. Because the study by Sutker and Allain showed that at least 25% have been arrested, one cannot simply assume that undergraduates with elevated psychopathy scores are non-criminal or have not been detected by law enforcement agencies.…”

“…The earliest research on college students was conducted by Sutker and Allain (1983), who identified a sample of ''adaptive sociopaths'' from medical students based on their MMPI scores. Compared with eight controls matched on age, psychosocial background, and intelligence, the eight adaptive sociopaths showed higher scores on impulsivity as indexed by Porteus Maze Q-scores, sensation seeking, and adolescent antisocial behavior, but lower scores on self-control and socialization.…”