Psychopathy
The construct of psychopathy is included in most of my research studies on violence. Psychopathy is a personality disorder with similarities to Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD). However, it includes additional emotional and interpersonal dysfunction, such as callousness, guiltlessness, and remorselessness.
Some of the specific research questions that I have, or am, addressing in my research on psychopathy include: (a) the role of psychopathy in the assessment of risk for violence among offenders, forensic psychiatric patients, civil psychiatric patients, and juvenile offenders; (b) the psychometric properties of various measures of psychopathy; (c) the factorial structure of measures of psychopathy, and their (in)variance across race, gender, and culture; and (d) the susceptibility of self-report measures of psychopathy to induced mood.
In addition, I am part of a research group that has recently completed a large, multi-site study (N = 1700) of psychopathy and ASPD among US offenders. There were two primary aims to the study: (a) can sub-types of psychopaths be identified on the basis of etiologically-informed theories of psychopathy? (b) what is the validity of self-report measures of psychopathy, in comparison to the more commonly used ‘expert rater’ methods (i.e., Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised)? This study is able to address research questions covering a broad span of topics relevant to psychopathy and ASPD, ranging from detailed psychometric questions to theory-testing.
