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

Abstract

The psychopathy field has long been beset by confusion and contention regarding the boundaries and features of this chimerical condition. We propose that this disagreement stems largely from the historical separation between psychopathy and basic personality psychology. Using findings from a meta-analysis of the correlations between the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) and normal-range personality traits as a launching point, we (a) deconstruct widely used measures of psychopathy into their constituent subdimensions and (b) examine the associations of these subdimensions with higher-order and lower-order personality dimensions drawn from the Big Five and Big Three frameworks. Our review of the adult psychopathy literature reveals broad agreement that psychopathy measures are imbued with low Agreeableness and low Conscientiousness. Nevertheless, substantial disagreement revolves around the place of largely adaptive features, especially high agentic Extraversion, low Neuroticism, and high Openness, within the psychopathy construct. We propose that ongoing debates regarding the nature and boundaries of psychopathy reflect a focus on two differing operationalizations of this condition, each of which reflects a different "species" of individual.

Concurrent and developmental correlates of psychopathic traits using a triarchic psychopathy model approach.

“…In this study, we calculated TriPM scales separately for men and women based on gender differences reported by Poy and colleagues (2014) such that each trait (boldness, disinhibition, meanness) was a sum of each included facet weight multiplied by the betas from regressions including the NEO facets and original Triarchic Personality Measure (see Table 1 for the regression equations used). This empirically-derived approach to creating psychopathy scores has been used extensively in past research on the NEO-PI-R and other personality measures (Lilienfeld et al, 2015). Boldness was formed from 22 NEO facets in women and 16 NEO facets in men, with the following facets having the highest weights across gender: lower depression (e.g., “Sometimes I feel completely worthless”, reverse), lower self-consciousness (e.g., “It doesn’t embarrass me too much if people ridicule and tease me”), lower vulnerability (e.g., “I rarely overindulge in anything”), and greater assertiveness (e.g., “I have often been a leader of groups I have belonged to”).…”

“…Thus, based on previously identified correlations between the TriPM traits as captured by the original Triarchic Psychopathy Measure and NEO items, we sought to create empirically-derived measures of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition, via a facet-weighted approached used by many other studies that examined personality-based approaches of psychopathy. To do so, previous studies have used regression weights generated from prior associations between traditional psychopathy measures (e.g., Psychopathic Personality Inventory, PPI; Lilienfeld & Widows, 2005) and personality scales (e.g., MPQ), which are then applied to create new psychopathy scales (e.g., MPQ-estimated PPI) (see Lilienfeld, Watts, Francis Smith, Berg, & Latzman, 2015 for a review of this and other personality approaches of psychopathy). In this approach, the regression weights from the previous study are multiplied against facet scores from the personality measure for each participant to create a weighted composite for each psychopathy dimension (e.g., if −.52 is the weight between facet Anxiety and TriPM boldness, then for each participant, −.52 is multiplied by the Anxiety facet score and added to all other weighted facet scores that were significantly correlated to boldness in the previous study).…”

Etiology of Triarchic Psychopathy Dimensions in Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

“…Although historically studied largely in criminal populations, a growing literature indicates that psychopathy represents a multidimensional construct grounded in basic biobehavioral dispositions that vary continuously within the neurotypical human population (Lilienfeld et al, in press; Patrick et al, 2009), and as such, differs from normality in degree, rather than in kind (Edens et al, 2006; Walters et al, 2011). Viewed in this way, understanding of psychopathy can be advanced through study of these basic dispositional dimensions in a range of populations, including both clinical and non-clinical samples (Hall & Benning, 2006; Lilienfeld, 1994; Salekin, 2006).…”

Clashing Diagnostic Approaches: DSM-ICD Versus RDoC

“…The history of the DSM and its revisions has been recounted in numerous sources (e.g., Lieberman & Ogas, 2015; Lilienfeld, Smith, & Watts, 2014; Widiger & Clark, 2000; Wilson, 1993), so we reprise it only very briefly here. In response to the perceived shortcomings with the first two DSMs, especially their often vague diagnostic descriptions and the low or best modest inter-rater reliabilities of their diagnostic categories, the American Psychiatric Association, with psychiatrist Robert Spitzer at the helm, released DSM-III in 1980 (American Psychiatric Association, 1980).…”