Encyclopedia of Psychology and Law

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Predictive utility (which seeks clinical utility) can-

not be mistaken for construct validity (which seeks

construct identification). To increase the PCL–R’s pre-

dictive utility, one could go beyond criminal behavior

to include items that assess young age and male gender.

This would not, however, necessarily enhance the mea-

sure’s validity in assessing psychopathic personality

disorder. To advance understanding of the construct,

psychopathy must be evaluated against a validation

hierarchy dictated by a theory of the disorder.

There are two major groups of theories about psy-

chopathy. The first group begins with Cleckley, who

posited that psychopathy is a largely inherited affective

deficit that results in self-defeating behavior. Similarly,

Robert Hare hypothesizes that this affective deficit

involves impaired processing of emotional meanings

related to language and may be based on reduced later-

alization of verbal processes. The second theoretical

group begins with the Fowles-Gray model of psychopa-

thy, which references two constitutionally based motiva-

tional systems that influence behavior. The behavioral

inhibition system (BIS) regulates responsiveness to

aversive stimuli and is associated with anxiety, whereas

the behavioral activation system (BAS) regulates appet-

itive motivation and is associated with impulsivity.

According to the Fowles-Gray theory, primary psy-

chopaths possess an intact BAS and a weak BIS, so they

do not experience anticipatory anxiety that causes most

people to inhibit activity that leads to punishment or

nonreward. In a related sense, David T. Lykken’s pri-

mary psychopath is fearless. Without the experience of

fear to facilitate learning to avoid conditions associated

with pain, the primary psychopath has difficulty with

avoidance learning. Rather than fearlessness, Joseph P.

Newman’s conceptualization emphasizes a lack of anx-

iety. Specifically, Newman postulates that a cognitive

processing or “response modulation” deficit lies at the

core of Cleckleyan psychopathy. These individuals are

unable to suspend a dominant response set to accommo-

date feedback from the environment.

Despite the differences among them, most of these

theories describe psychopathy as a largely inherited

affective or cognitive processing deficit. These theories

dictate a validation hierarchy that places pathophysio-

logic and etiological mechanisms at the top, as they

offer the greatest potential for explaining the disorder

and potentially altering its course. Although unmodu-

lated, unrestrained, or self-defeating behavior is symp-

tomatic of the disorder, and may be found at lower

levels of the validation hierarchy, there is nothing spe-

cific to criminal or violent behavior. Indeed, several

theories explicitly omit criminal behavior. The question

is whether the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy iden-

tify a homogeneous group of individuals with clearly

delineated deficits and largely genetic pathophysiology.

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The PCL–R has been most thoroughly evaluated in

laboratory experiments as comprising the diagnostic cri-

teria for psychopathy. Although these criteria do appear

to identify a group of individuals with theoretically rel-

evant deficits, they could be refined to do this better. On

the one hand, PCL–R scores are associated with dimin-

ished startle response to negative or aversive emotional

cues, less autonomic arousal during fear and distress

imagery, and greater recall for the peripheral details of

aversive images. On the other hand, the PCL–R omits

key features of psychopathy, such as low anxiety.

Among offenders with high PCL–R scores, only those

who also manifest low anxiety show response modula-

tion deficits on a passive avoidance learning task or

reduced sensitivity to cues of punishment when a

reward-oriented response set is primed. Moreover, the

PCL–R overemphasizes antisocial behavior. When

PCL–R scale scores are examined, performance on

many of these laboratory measures is more strongly

linked with the emotional detachment scale than the

antisocial behavior scale. Integrating across studies, the

core of psychopathy seems to involve emotional detach-

ment, including low anxiety, not antisocial behavior.

Although one might interpret the results of these

experiments as evidence that psychopathy is geneti-

cally influenced, caution should be exercised in draw-

ing premature inferences because the heritability of

these laboratory variables is unclear. To date, no

behavior genetic studies of PCL–R psychopathy have

been conducted. Nevertheless, several survey studies

indicate that childhood maltreatment is more strongly

associated with the PCL–R’s antisocial behavior scale

than its emotional detachment scale. In keeping with

the experimental data, this suggests that emotional

detachment is a more theoretically valid indicator of

psychopathy than antisocial behavior.

To date, only one behavior genetic study of psy-

chopathy has been conducted with adults or adoles-

cents. In this twin study of more than 600 17-year-olds

drawn from the community, a measure of normal per-

sonality was used to estimate scores on a promising

self-report measure of psychopathy, the PPI. Although

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