| Summary: | This study was concerned with the relations between
representations of psychopathy and interpersonal
perceptions. From 147 inmates seen in a federal medium security
prison, 79 of the men provided complete data for
comparisons. Groups were defined under criteria from (1)
the Psychopathy Checklist (PC) (Hare, 1985b), or (2)
American Psychiatric Association (1980, 1987) outlines
for Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD). Measures were
derived from the Interpersonal Adjective Scales-Revised
(IAS-R) (Wiggins, Trapnell, and Phillips, 1988 ) which
relate interpersonally defined perceptions of personality
as locations within a circumplex space--Interpersonal
Circle (Wiggins, 1979, 1980). Self-ratings were obtained
as descriptive of (1) self, (2) ideal self, (3) self as
thought seen by a friends, and (4) self as thought seen
by a specific member of the institutional staff. A rating
was also obtained from the specific staff members as
descriptive of the particular inmates.
Comparisons were also made with respect to the
specificity and sensitivity of MMPI profiles considered
relevant to psychopathy. Supplementary comparisons
used selected scales from the Adjective Checklist (ACL)
(Gough and Heilbrun, 1980) and Rosenberg's (1965) Self- esteem Scale. These comparisons provided manipulation
checks of the consistency of the data and contributed to
the interpretive generalizability of the results.
The primary hypotheses were that a group of
individuals defined as psychopathic would show differences
in representations obtained from self-rated and other-rated
descriptions, with respect to circumplex location
and derived difference scores from the IAS-R, in
comparison to groups considered non-psychopathic.
Results indicated differential perceptions,
particularly by staff members, which provided good
discriminations of groups based on the PC but not for
groups defined by APD. Circumplex locations of
psychopaths defined by the PC were consistent with
expectations for the Interpersonal Circle. The
discriminative utility of group differences was much
higher for the PC-defined groups than for APD relative
to the base rates for these different categorizations.
The results are discussed in terms of (1) their
contribution to the nomological network for the concept
of psychopathy as represented by the PC, (2) specific
limitations of the study, and (3) the evident confusion
which can result from the use of measures assumed to
to relate to the 'psychopath,' but that rely on primarily
behavioural descriptions. === Arts, Faculty of === Psychology, Department of === Graduate
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