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ETHNICDIFFERENCES

IN PSYCHOPATHY

Psychopathic personality disorder comprises a distinct

collection of deviant affective, interpersonal, and

behavioral features. Results of psychopathy testing can

sway life-altering decisions for the examinee, includ-

ing granting of parole, outcome in sexually violent

predator civil commitment trials, gaining access to

treatment, and even being sentenced to death. Because

the disorder is strongly predictive of violent and gen-

eral criminal recidivism, it has had an impact on cor-

rectional theory, public policy, and legal decision

making on an international scale. Although psychopa-

thy is one of the most researched disorders within the

field of psychology and law, until recently most empir-

ical investigations involved White male prisoners and

forensic psychiatric patients in North America. Given

that assessments of psychopathy occur regularly and as

a matter of law in many contexts, it is crucial to ascer-

tain the extent to which the primarily White male

research base generalizes to other relevant populations,

such as individuals of other ethnic backgrounds.

Research indicates that the Psychopathy Checklist–

Revised (PCL–R) measures the disorder in an unbi-

ased way across ethnocultural groups within a single

culture (White vs. Black within North America,

Scottish vs. English and Welsh within the United

Kingdom). However, there is some evidence of cross-

national metric invariance: That is, North Americans

obtain PCL–R scores that are 2 to 3 points higher than

those of Europeans, given equivalent levels on the

underlying trait of psychopathy. Moreover, whereas

there is little cross-cultural bias in ratings of affective

symptoms of psychopathy, bias does exist for ratings

of the interpersonal and behavioral symptoms. In light

of the substantial weight placed on PCL–R results

when important decisions about individual liberties are

made, it is crucial that cross-cultural research continue,

preferably using more culturally informed classifica-

tions of ethnic status and with varied samples, includ-

ing women and girls and individuals outside of Europe

and North America. Such research may also shed light

on the etiological bases underpinning the divergent

manifestations of psychopathy.

Ethnicityrefers to differences in culture and ances-

try. In social sciences research, the term raceis often

used interchangeably with ethnicity, although the for-

mer term generally denotes more fine-grained genetic

differences. In psychopathy research, race typically is

based on self-identification rather than biological or

genetic classification. In this entry, the term ethnicity is

used to refer to ethnic, cultural, and racial groups as

conceptualized within the relevant research literature

on ethnicity and psychopathy. Three key issues have

been addressed within this research base: (a) the

degree to which similar patterns of associations

between external correlates of psychopathy are observed

across groups, (b) measurement generalization across

groups, and (c) mean levels of psychopathic traits

across groups.

External Correlates of

Psychopathy Across Ethnic Groups

For psychopathy to be construed as a universal syn-

drome, the correlates of psychopathy should be similar

across ethnic groups. The correlates that, perhaps, are

of greatest interest include antisocial behavior and vio-

lence. Results of studies on adult criminal offending in

the community conducted outside North America and

with non-Whites in North America are similar in that

psychopathy is inversely related to age of onset of

criminal behavior and that individuals scoring high on

psychopathic traits commit more violent and nonvio-

lent crime and are more versatile in their crime pat-

terns. Meta-analytic evidence indicates, however, that

psychopathy is a weaker correlate of violent recidi-

vism among more ethnically diverse samples of juve-

nile offenders relative to primarily White samples.

Pertaining to institutional aggression, meta-analytic

results indicate that the country under study matters:

Although the predictive utility of psychopathy for

broad categories of institutional misbehavior is good,

its relation to violent infractions in the United States is

substantially smaller than in non-U.S. institutions. One

explanation for this disparity is the potentially greater

ethnic heterogeneity in U.S. samples.

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