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Psychopathy/Personality Disorders - Coggle Diagram
Psychopathy/Personality Disorders
Personality
From the latin word “persona” meaning mask- Personality refers to “individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving” APA
Key assumptions
Personality is stable over time
Personality influences behaviour
There are a finite number of dimensions on which people can differ. These dimensions are referred to as personality traits.
personality changes
Maturity principle: increase in agreeableness and conscientiousness, decrease in neuroticism, over young adulthood
Major life events can lead to changes in personality
Changes in personality over covid-19, young adults showed disrupted maturity
Neuroticism can reduce through therapeutic intervention.
factor analysis
Factors consist of items that correlate highly with each other but lowly with other items on the scale.
Eysenck’s Personality Theory
- Eysenck used factory analysis to reduce Cattell’s 16PF into 2 factors > extraversion/introversion and emotionally unstable (neurotic)/emotionally stable
Similar to the 4 humours.
Later he added a third factor > psychoticism
Misnomer; refers to aggression, coldness, lack of empathy and manipulativeness.
Its up to the experimenter to choose the names of their traits, and sometimes they don’t choose great ones.
big 5: ffm
Current dominant model
OCEAN:
Openness to experience: inventive and curious vs consistent and cautious
Conscientiousness: efficient and organised vs easy-going and careless
Extraversion: outgoing and energetic vs solitary and reserved
Agreeableness: friendly and compassionate vs analytical and detached
Neuroticism: sensitive and nervous vs secure and confident
scale for measurement
NEO-Personality Inventory-Revised (NEO-PI-R)
240 questions (48 for each 5 factors), 5 point scale (strongly agree to strongly disagree), each factor is comprised of 6 facets (sub-factors)
Extraversion is comprised of warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity, excitement seeking, positive emotions
Reliability: internal consistency ~ 0.9; test-retest (1 week) ~0.9
Validity: criterion > conscientiousness predicts GPA of uni students
Convergent validity: NEO-PI-R extraversion score correlates highly with Eysenk.
Raymond Cettell
used factor analysis to identify 16 “personality factors” > developed 16PF questionnaire.
the dark triad
Subclinical set of negative personality traits
Narcissism: attention-seeking, arrogant, vain, entitled
Psychopathy: callous, insensitive, lacking in remorse, cynical
Machiavellianism: manipulative, strategic, will flatter and lie to get their way.
Attractiveness
Participants had their photo taken and complete scales assessing their level of dark triad factors
The attractiveness of these photos rated by opposite-sex strangers
Participants who scored high on the dark triad where rated as more attractive
Psychopathy
what is psychopathy
Hervey Cleckley > The Mask of Sanity (1941)
Based on experiences with psychiatric patients, narrowed psychopathy construct, forms basis for modern conceptualisation.
Prevalence: in general population, ~1%. For antisocial behaviour in general population, ~10%. Cause >$460 billion in costs for damage, crimes, cost to victims, health services etc.
Don’t tend to specialise in one crime, rather just whatever presents itself.
Chronic behavioural deviance
Inadequately motivated antisocial behaviour
Poor judgement/failure to learn from experience
Unreliability
Fantastic and uninviting behaviour with/without drinking
Sex life impersonal, trivial, poorly integrated
Failure to follow any life plan.
Positive adjustment:
Superficial charm and good “intelligence”
Absence of delusions/irrational thinking
Absence of nervousness or neuroses
Suicide rarely carried out
Emotional-interpersonal deficits
Untruthfulness and insincerity
Lack of remorse or shame
General poverty in major affective reactions
Pathological egocentricity and incapacity for love
Specific loss of insight
Unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations
how is psychopathy assessed?
Robert Hare
Early empirical study of psychopathy
Developed the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL) and its derivatives
Original version published in 1980 (revised in 1991)
To address lack of objective psychopathy measures
Intended to capture the psychopathy construct described by Cleckley
Initially validated in relation to global and checklist measures of Cleckly psychopathy.
Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist-Revised
Semi-structured face-to-face interviews covering education, employment, family, relationships, criminal history, substance use, etc.
Supplemented by detailed review of institutional file material
Information used to score 20 items
Each item scored on a 3 point scale (0-2)
0 > does not apply
1 > applies somewhat
2 > describes individual in most respects.
Item scores summed to generate total and factor scores: 30+/40 = psychopath
Measuring Youth Psychopathy > Antisocial Process Screening Device
Callous-unemotional traits > affective symptoms > best identified the children at risk for psychopathy
CU traits > those who had them were in a subset of children with conduct or oppositional defiant disorder
Lack of remorse or guilt
Lack of concern for other’s feelings
Lack of concern over poor performance at school
Shallow or deficient emotions
Conduct problems + CU traits increase instances of delinquency, and a younger age of engaging in delinquency (7 years old).
More likely to engage in proactive and reactive aggression
More likely to engage in sexual offending later in life
Victims tend to have more severe injuries.
More likely to have ASPD and psychopathy as adults.
PCL scorers
Disproportionate criminal involvement > versatile offenders
Most severe and violent offenders > predatory affression
Predictor of future violence and criminal involvement > general and violent recidivism, nonviolent and violent infracts
Attributed to unique causal factors
Poor response to treatment
Sex differences in women
Less prevalent in women
More sexual promiscuity, prostitution, use of nonviolent sexual coercive tactics, and relational aggression
Overlap with somatization, histrionic PD, borderline PD
Predictor of suicide-related behaviours
Mixed findings for greater violent and non-violent crime and recidivism
Mixed findings for same causal factors as men
Higher rates of childhood abuse, neglect and trauma
Research still lags far behind that on men and boys.
what causes psychopathy
Callous-unemotional same as limited prosocial emotions.
Coercive cycle less important in CU children > same behaviour no matter the parenting styles of the parents.
The leading theory is that CU children don’t learn the conditioning between a bad behaviour and punishment/getting in trouble, and so there's no inhibition of bad behaviour. There's also an emotional deficit that inhibits the learning of hurting another person as a bad thing > no empathy towards distress.
Evidence in the brain: different function and structure of the amygdala > different size and activity.
Brain differences in CU subtype of CP
Amygdalas of kinds with CU under-react, kids without CU over-react.
Violent psychopaths have smaller amygdalas than nonviolent psychopaths.
Attention deficit:
So reward-driven and goal-directed that they miss anything happening in the periphery, other cues don’t make it to their conscious attention.
Behavioural genetics:
Twin studies show greater genetic contribution to conduct problems in youth with CU traits > heritability of 0.81 (CU traits) vs 0.30 (without CU traits).
The higher contribution of genes vs environment for callous-unemotional conduct problems > may be why coercive parenting matters less.
Not due to more severe conduct problems or ADHD symptoms.
Punishment learning:
Punishment cues are less aversive
After learning a behaviour is rewarded, struggle to re-learn same behaviour is punished > new contingency > response modulation deficit
Struggle to link consequence with own behaviour as the cause.
can psychopathy be treated
VERY few studies on psychopathic adults for treatment.
Tend to see a drop in factor 2 symptoms as a person ages (around 50s), but factor 1 stays the same.
Strong pessimistic opinions on whether psychopathy can be treated > largely based on one unconventional study that make patients worse.
Mainly poorly designed and carried out studies
Treatment effective in reducing re-offending in psychopathic juvenile offenders
Early intervention with children with callous-unemotional conduct problems promising.