Psychopathy Flashcards
Personality disorders
Deeply ingrained, inflexible patterns of thinking or feeling relating to others, difficulty controlling impulses
Long standing and usually begins before adulthood (no noticeable change in a person’s behaviour)
Personality Disorder Criteria
A - Enduring pattern of deviation
B - Pattern is inflexible and consistent across all social situations
C - Leads to distress or impairment
D - Stable and long duration tracing back to adolescence
E - Pattern is not explained by another condition
F - Behaviour not due to medication or substance
Antisocial personality disorder
Clinical diagnosis in the DSM-5. Categorised as ‘a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, occurring since the age of 15.
Psychopathy
Theorised as a disorder of personality and affective deficits while ASPD diagnosis is behaviour based
Anti-social disorder diagnostic criteria
- Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviours
- Deceitfulness
- Irritability and aggressiveness
- Reckless disregard for safety of self or others
- Impulsivity
- Consistent irresponsibility
- Lack of remorse
Borderline Personality Disorder criteria
Inappropriate or intense anger or difficulty controlling anger
How many people have anti-social personality disorder?
Approximately 1-4%
Male vs Female personality disorder
Males are 3 to 5 times more likely to be diagnosed with ASPD than females (Compton et al, 2005)
Psychopathy and Antisocial personality disorder
Nearly all cases of psychopathy meet criteria for ASPD, whereas only a small amount of ASPD participants meet criteria for psychopathy (Hare, 1996)
Fazel and Danesh (2002)
Reviewed 62 surveys from 12 countries (>22000 prisoners)
65% of men and 42% of women had a PD
47% of men and 21% of women had ASPD
Prisoners were 10x more likely to have ASPD than average population
How many prisoners have ASPD?
Approximately 4.4% in the UK but 15% in the USA
Personality disorders in prisons
Prisons have different norms of behaviour compared to the outside world. Prisons emphasise characteristics of fear, anxiety, hostility, suspiciousness, self-centredness and social withdrawal which could exaggerate personality characteristics.
Few et al (2015)
The higher ASPD, the more high participants would score on the psychopathy test.
Psychopathy definition (Cleckley, 1941)
A clinical construct defined by a collection of interpersonal, affective and lifestyle characteristics
Little reference to criminality at first
How is Psychopathy measured?
By the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R) theorised by Hare in 2007
Primary Psychopathy (Porter, 1996)
Born with a predisposition to interpersonal and affective features of psychopathy
Secondary Psychopathy (Porter, 1996)
Acquired deficits associated with psychopathy following negative life events
4 sub factors of the PLC-R
Interpersonal, Affective, Lifestyle, Antisocial. 20 items from each.
Scores of the PCL-R
Rater scores each item on a 3 point ordinal scale (0-2) according to the extent to which the item applies.
Dimension scores vary from 0-40. Either 30+ (US/Canada) or 25+ (UK) means you’re a psychopath
PCL-R Accuracy (Hare et al, 2000)
Studied 728 male UK prisoners.
Found that PCL-R predicted prison assaults, violent reconviction rate and general recidivism rate more than other risk assessment tools.
Hare (1999)
Psychopaths use violence in a more instrumental way, without emotion and more predatory.
Woodworth and Porter (2002)
93.3% of homicides by psychopaths instrumental while only 48.8% of non-psychopath murders instrumental
Non-psychopathic tended to be more reactive and with strong emotion
What brain area is responsible for psychopathy?
Amygdala
Amygdala facts
Controls automatic responses associated with fear and emotion
Important in attention, learning and affect
Involved in processing emotions, particularly fear.
Blair (1995)
Identified the Violence Inhibition Mechanism
Children need to recognise and associate harmful transgressors with victim’s distress. Amygdala damage can make this not the case.
Adolphs et al (1999)
Tested 9 patients with amygdala damage and found that their psychopathy ranged from severe to normal amounts of psychopathy
Waldman and Rhee (2006)
Genetics account for 50% of variance in psychopathic traits
Tuvblad et al (2014)
Up to 69% of psychopathic traits could be due to genetics
Larsson et al (2007)
Longitudanal twin study in Sweden and found common genetic characteristics loaded into affective/interpersonal and lifestyle aspects of psychopathy.
Environment only effected lifestyle/antisocial
Marsh and Blair (2008)
Meta-analytic evidence for impaired fear recognition among antisocial populations
Dawel et al (2012)
The amygdala has a broader role in emotion processing and can even effect vocal tone
Viding and McCrory (2012)
Callous unemotional traits in childhood have moderate-to-high heritability
Viding et al (2005)
High callous unemotional traits are more dominant in genetics than those of low callous unemotional traits
Blonigen et al (2008)
58% of the stability of callous unemotional traits was due to genetic influences
McMahon et al (2010)
High callous emotional traits in young people led to more delinquency, juvenile and adult arrests, and ASPD diagnosis.
Frick et al (2013)
Psychopathic traits remain stable from childhood to adulthood in its severest form
Harris, Skilling and Rice (2001)
Callous unemotional traits shown to remain consistently stable
