Structural differences in psychopathy between women and men: a latent modeling perspective

Abstract

Research on sex differences in psychopathy indicates that men generally exhibit higher psychopathy scores than women. Measurement equivalence is an important prerequisite for the investigation of mean differences, but is often neglected for psychopathy instruments. The current research provides a systematic qualitative review of the pertinent literature on measurement invariance between men and women for several rater-based and self-report-based psychopathy assessments. Based on 28 studies, we found that the factor structure and factor loadings are most likely comparable between sexes for four out of nine instruments. Results on item thresholds, however, are inconsistent, which questions the comparability of mean scores between men and women for these instruments. The majority of studies that reported acceptable measurement equivalence indicated higher psychopathy scores among men compared to women. As the current literature is neither consistent nor exhaustive, further research needs to address structural differences in psychopathy between biological sexes more systematically.

Gendered Sadism: Exploring Measurement Invariance between Men and Women

“…A recent study found that measures of everyday sadism are in fact measuring shades of subclinical psychopathy because the two constructs could not be separated in factor analyses, and they outperformed each other in terms of correlations with assumed core features of the respectively other construct (Blötner & Mokros, 2023). At the same time, evidence is thin with respect to gender invariance of extant measures of subclinical psychopathy (Spormann et al, 2023). Given that Blötner and Mokros' study was exclusively based on self-report data (posing a strong common method effect) and their sample was predominantly female (about 77%), it would be interesting to test in future research whether differences between scales on subclinical psychopathy and everyday sadism exist with respect to gender invariance.…”