Understanding psychopathy through an evaluation of interpersonal behavior: testing the factor structure of the interpersonal measure of psychopathy in a large sample of jail detainees.

Psychopathy consists of an amalgamation of traits, including glibness, superficiality, lack of remorse, callousness, and impulsivity, in conjunction with the violation of rules and social norms (Hare, 1996; Hare, 2003). The construct of psychopathy has demonstrated strong associations with untoward outcomes, including violent recidivism (Gray, Fitzgerald, Taylor, MacCulloch, & Snowden, 2007; Leistico, Salekin, DeCoster, & Rogers, 2008; Salekin, Rogers, & Sewell, 1996; Z. Walsh & Kosson, 2007) and decimated interpersonal relationships (LeBreton, Binning, & Adorno, 2006; Ullrich, Farrington, & Coid, 2008). As a result, psychopathy is now firmly established as a construct in experimental psychopathology (Patrick, 2006) and is frequently evaluated in clinical and forensic psychology contexts (T. Walsh & Walsh, 2006). It is not surprising that, as psychopathy has gained in standing, there has been a concerted effort to develop specialized instruments to accurately assess the construct. Through programmatic research, the assessment of psychopathy has taken major strides since Cleckley (1941) first formalized the modern concept of the disorder. Based in part on Cleckley’s conceptualization, the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL–R; Hare, 2003) and its progeny, the Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (PCL:SV; Hart, Cox, & Hare, 1995) and the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV; Forth, Kosson, & Hare, 2003), were developed. Through multiple and diverse validation studies, PCL ratings of psychopathy have demonstrated solid reliability and construct validity (for reviews, see Hare & Neumann, 2008; Rogers, 2001). However, progress in assessing psychopathy did not end with PCL measures, and recent developments have yielded new insights into the disorder. In the last decade, specialized self-report instruments have been designed and validated for assessing psychopathy in community samples (Lilienfeld & Fowler, 2006). Even scales and subscales on multiscale inventories such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (2nd ed.; Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989) and the Personality Assessment Inventory (Morey, 1991; Morey, 1996) have demonstrated promise in capturing aspects of the psychopathy construct (Douglas, Guy, Edens, Boer, & Hamilton, 2007; Sellbom, Ben-Porath, & Stafford, 2007; Walters & Duncan, 2005). The increase in attention to assessment methodologies has been a boon to developing greater understanding of psychopathy. Much of the literature demonstrating the value of assessing psychopathy consists of studies of European American offenders. In recent years, a small number of studies have demonstrated the value of assessing psychopathic features in African Americans (Cooke, Kosson, & Michie, 2001; Kosson, Smith, & Newman, 1990; Skeem, Edens, Camp, & Colwell, 2004) and in Latino Americans (Sullivan, Abramowitz, Lopez, & Kosson, 2006). These studies have demonstrated that psychopathy has many of the same correlates in Latino and African American offenders, although the pattern of correlations is not entirely the same in European American and African American offenders (e.g., Lorenz & Newman, 2002; Newman & Schmitt, 1998). Recently, it has been argued that a more systematic evaluation of the psychopathy construct in different ethnic groups is necessary (Sullivan & Kosson, 2006).