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In an effort to validate Levenson, Kiehl and Fitzpatrick's [Levenson, M. R., Kiehl, K. A., & Fitzpatrick, C. M. (1995). Assessing psychopathic attributes in a noninstitutionalized population. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 151–158]. Self-report Psychopathy Scale (SRPS) we compared it to Hare's [Hare, R. D. (1991). The Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. Toronto: Multi-Health Systems] (PCL-R) and examined its relation to criminal activity and a passive avoidance task. Participants were 270 Caucasian and 279 African-American participants in a minimum security state prison. Confirmatory factor analysis provided modest support for the original SRPS factor structure. Although diagnostic concordance of the two instruments ranged from poor to fair, the SRPS and the PCL-R were significantly correlated and both showed similar patterns of correlations to measures of substance abuse and criminal versatility. Both measures were also predictive of performance on a passive avoidance task. While this constellation of findings provides some evidence for the construct validity of the SRPS, it also suggests that the SRPS may not measure the same construct as the PCL-R and further refinement of the instrument appears to be warranted.

Psychopathy refers to a disorder that begins early in life and is characterized by a variety of antisocial behaviors and exploitative interpersonal relationships. Prototypical psychopathic traits include callous and manipulative use of others, shallow and short-lived affect, irresponsible/impulsive behavior, egocentricity, and pathological lying (Cleckley, 1976). Although this description includes both personality and behavioral characteristics, recent attempts to operationalize the psychopathy construct — such as the DSM-IV (APA, 1994) Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD) diagnosis — have focused on criminal behaviors as criteria for diagnostic purposes (Hare, 1985a, Hare, 1996, Lilienfeld, 1994 and Millon, 1981). Researchers dissatisfied with the APD criteria believe that personality features integral to the psychopathy construct are currently underrepresented by DSM diagnostic criteria (Hare, 1985b). Hare (1996), for example, cites work demonstrating that the APD diagnosis identifies a more heterogeneous group than do assessments based on inferred prototypical psychopathic traits. Trait-based assessments of psychopathy have been derived almost entirely from the work of Cleckley (1976). Using his wealth of clinical experience as a guide, Cleckley was able to extract commonalties from numerous exemplar case studies to define general features which he felt represented the core of the psychopathy construct. Often referred to as the Cleckley criteria, these 16 features included such behaviors as failure to learn from experience and persistent lying as well as personality components such as callousness and egocentricity. Such traits, Cleckley argued, were prototypically psychopathic and might serve as markers for identifying those with the disorder. Although Cleckley's efforts were entirely descriptive and he never presented a formal diagnostic system, he laid the groundwork for future efforts to define psychopathy as a construct capable of reliable identification. Hare, 1980 and Hare, 1991 took up where Cleckley left off. Concerned that progress in the field was being hampered by the lack of a sound psychometric instrument for the reliable and valid assessment of psychopathy, Hare sought to transform the Cleckley criteria into a reliable diagnostic instrument. The result was the initial Psychopathy Checklist (PCL) and its revision, the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). Both versions of the checklist were multi-item scales rated on the basis of personal interviews and corroborating information. Items were constructed based on the initial Cleckley criteria, although some were modified so as to be more clearly assessed. Since its publication, the PCL-R (Hare, 1991) has been a widely used measure and has been shown to have excellent psychometric properties in a variety of incarcerated populations (Hare, 1996). Moreover, the development of the PCL-R as a standardized diagnostic tool has provided the foundation for a deluge of much-needed experimental work investigating the nature of the psychopathy construct. Many intriguing findings about PCL-R defined psychopaths have emerged in the last decade. Among these are studies demonstrating that psychopaths display poor passive avoidance learning (Newman & Kosson, 1986, Newman et al., 1990 and Thornquist & Zuckerman, 1995), less differentiated emotional responses to affective stimuli (Patrick, 1994), smaller skin conductance responses to fearful or distressing stimuli (Blair et al., 1997, Hare, 1978 and Ogloff & Wong, 1990), and difficulties processing or producing emotional language (Day & Wong, 1996 and Hare et al., 1988). Such findings have increased understanding of psychopathic behavior and helped to generate hypotheses about the etiology of psychopathy (for a review, see Hare, 1996). Although this work has been important to advancing the field of psychopathy, it does have a major limitation. Almost without exception, all of these findings have been obtained using participants from penal institutions. Many people feel that psychopathy necessarily implies criminal activity, but Cleckley (1976) clearly believed it did not. The different case studies Cleckley presented were representative of a surprisingly large cross-section of the population. These individuals were from every social class, both genders, and different ethnic backgrounds. The doctors, lawyers, and dilettantes described by Cleckley were a far cry from the criminals more commonly discussed in the literature of today. Essentially, Cleckley made the case that psychopathy could, and did, exist in the population as a whole and did not necessarily involve criminal activity. If this is the case, why is it that most work with psychopaths has been done in a prison setting? There appear to be at least two reasons. First, when one is attempting to diagnose individuals well known for their deceitfulness, it is unwise to base diagnoses only on self-report interview information. Prisons maintain institutional files which can serve to corroborate or refute an inmate's interview information. Second, psychopathy is relatively infrequent in the population as a whole (Hare, 1991). An efficient way to obtain a large number of participants for study is to sample from institutions where poorly socialized behavior is the norm — prisons. Despite these valid reasons for conducting research in a correctional setting, such a sampling strategy restricts the focus of psychopathy research to a relatively narrow group of criminal psychopaths. Any findings based on prison samples must be regarded as tentative because they may be true of only the subset of institutionalized psychopaths (Widom, 1977). In order to fully understand the construct of psychopathy as conceptualized by Cleckley (1976), we must also look at noninstitutionalized individuals. To do this successfully will require an instrument which measures the Cleckley/Hare psychopathy construct and which can be efficiently administered to a large community sample to identify enough psychopaths to conduct meaningful experimental studies. To date, efforts to produce such instruments have been unable to address both of these concerns. Hart, Cox and Hare (1995) derived a measure from the PCL-R for use with community samples, the Psychopathy Checklist- Screening Version (PCL-SV). The PCL-SV is, however, still interview based and, thus, expensive to administer to large groups of participants. To overcome this problem, researchers have used pen and paper assessments such as the psychopathic deviate (Pd) scale of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and the socialization scale (So) of the California Psychological Inventory (CPI; Gough, 1969). Unfortunately, these scales appear to be better measures of antisocial behavior than psychopathic personality and, thus, capture only part of the psychopathy construct (Hare, 1991 and Hare, 1996). A more sophisticated self-report instrument, the Psychopathy Personality Inventory (PPI; Lilienfeld & Andrews, 1996), has been developed but there is still limited data examining how this measure relates to the psychopathy construct as defined by the PCL-R (Poythress, Edens & Lilienfeld, 1998).1 Thus researchers are still in need of a valid measure of psychopathy which is also easy, quick, and inexpensive to administer. Levenson et al. (1995) attempted to develop such a scale. The self-report psychopathy scale (SRPS) is a pen and paper measure of psychopathy based on the PCL-R criteria and designed for use in college samples. The SRPS consists of 26 items divided into two separate scales — primary and secondary psychopathy. These scales correspond roughly to the two factors of the PCL-R. The primary psychopathy scale was designed to “assess a selfish, uncaring, and manipulative posture towards others” (p.152) while the secondary psychopathy scale was created to “assess impulsivity and a self defeating life style” (p. 152; Levenson et al.). Instead of emphasizing criminal activity, the SRPS was designed to elicit information about behaviors more typical of community life. For example, the individual's integrity is assessed by items such as “even if I were trying hard to sell a product I would not lie about it” (p. 153; Levenson et al.). Levenson et al. (1995) sought to validate the measure in two ways. First, they examined the instrument's correlations with various self-report scales measuring constructs such as harm avoidance, boredom susceptibility, and thrill/adventure seeking to determine if they were of the direction and magnitude that would be expected for a measure of the psychopathy construct. Second, they tried to determine if high scores on the SRPS were predictive of various antisocial behaviors within a college environment such as cheating on exams, plagiarism, and drunk and disorderly behavior (i.e. academic disciplinary problems). Levenson et al. (1995) found that SRPS scores were correlated as expected with other measures of personality. SRPS scores were also found to be a significant predictor of academic disciplinary problems. Lynam, Whiteside and Jones (1999) recently conducted a cross validation study in which they replicated the SRPS' factor structure and relation to antisocial acts. They also demonstrated that SRPS scores were capable of predicting poor passive avoidance in a college sample (Lynam et al., 1999). Although these data provide preliminary evidence concerning the validity of the SRPS as a measure of psychopathy, there is still an important piece of evidence which needs to be collected before we can conclude that this is the case. First, neither Levenson et al. (1995) nor Lynam et al. (1999) made use of the PCL-R in their validation studies. It, therefore, remains to be seen if the SRPS measures a comparable construct to that tapped by the present “gold standard” of psychopathy assessment. Thus, the next step in the validation of the SRPS as a measure for psychopathy would seem to require comparing the SRPS with the PCL-R. Despite the fact that the SRPS was intended for noninstitutionalized populations, we believe this can be best accomplished in a prison sample. There are two reasons for this. First, almost all work validating the PCL-R has been done in a prison setting. Second, if the SRPS assesses the kind of impulsive, selfish, and callous presentation which we would expect from anyone meeting the Cleckley criteria (institutionalized or not), it should be a valid indicator of psychopathy even in a prison population. In an attempt to cross-validate the SRPS in a prison population and determine if the SRPS measures the same construct as the PCL-R, we gathered data from a minimum security prison in Wisconsin in four different validation domains. In particular, we investigated (1) the SRPS's factor structure and internal consistency, (2) the association of the SRPS with the PCL-R, (3) the similarity of the SRPS's and PCL-R's relationships to criminal activity and substance abuse, and (4) the relation between SRPS scores and performance on a laboratory measure of passive avoidance. If the SRPS can be shown to have the expected relations to important elements of psychopathy's nomological net (i.e. PCL-R scores, substance abuse, passive avoidance deficits, etc.), then we will have taken some important steps towards validating an easily administered, pen and paper measure of psychopathy.