ویژگی های غیرجنایتکاران با صفات اختلالات فکری و روانی بالا: آیا آنها شبیه اختلالات فکری و روانی جنایی هستند؟

This study compared the findings from a sample of non-criminals with high and low psychopathy levels to published findings with criminal psychopaths and non-psychopaths. Congruent to findings with criminal psychopaths, participants with high psychopathy traits (High-P) compared to those with low psychopathy traits (Low-P) performed significantly worse on the Iowa Gambling Task, a task sensitive to orbital frontal cortex dysfunction. Moreover, the High-P group also evidenced a lack of empathy, a hallmark feature of psychopathy. These findings could not be explained by differences in estimated IQ or performance on a task sensitive to an executive functioning deficit. The discussion focuses on possible differences between non-criminal and criminal psychopaths, concluding criminal psychopaths manifest more extreme degrees of the interpersonal-affective and antisocial features of psychopathy.

The majority of psychopathy research has been conducted with criminal samples employing the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R; 1991, 2003), the “gold standard” measure of psychopathy in clinical settings. Psychopathy, as captured by the PCL-R, is a hierarchical construct encompassing four facets reflecting its affective (e.g., lack of empathy), interpersonal (e.g., grandiosity), lifestyle (e.g., impulsivity) and antisocial (e.g., delinquency) features. Whilst the existence of non-criminal psychopaths has long been recognized (e.g., Cleckley, 1964 and Schneider, 1958), relatively few studies have been conducted with this population. Consequently, our understanding of the differences between non-criminal and criminal psychopaths is incomplete. Understanding the differences between these two populations is important as it may identify “protective” factors preventing community-dwelling, non-criminal psychopaths from becoming criminal psychopaths (Frick et al., 2003 and Lilienfeld, 1994). Comparing the characteristics of non-criminal and criminal psychopaths has been problematic for a number of reasons, one being the inappropriateness of using the PCL-R in non-clinical settings. The PCL-R’s lengthy administration time coupled with the low percentage of community-dwelling psychopaths (approximately 1%; Hare, 2003) renders it inefficient for mass screenings; a necessary method for obtaining sufficient sample sizes. Moreover, various conceptualizations of the ‘non-criminal’ psychopath exist that do not capture the same psychopathy construct as the PCL-R. Therefore, the use of different psychopathy constructs across studies with non-criminal and criminal samples makes comparing the findings of such studies difficult. Three commonly used measures of non-criminal psychopathy include Levenson’s Primary and Secondary Psychopathy scales (LPSP; Levenson, Kiehl, & Fitzpatrick, 1995), the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI; Lilienfeld & Andrews, 1996) and the Behavioral Activation/Inhibition System scales (Carver & White, 1994). Whilst the LPSP (Brinkley, Schmitt, Smith, & Newman, 2001) and PPI (Poythress, Edens, & Lilienfeld, 1998) have shown moderate correlations with the PCL-R, they were not modeled on the PCL-R so may capture a divergent psychopathy construct. However, another commonly used measure, the Self-Report Psychopathy scale (SRP), was modeled on the Psychopathy Checklist (Hare, 1985). A revised version of the SRP showed a moderate correlation (mean r = .38) with the PCL-R ( Zágon & Jackson, 1994) and correlations of .55 for women and .62 for men with the screening version of the PCL-R ( Forth, Brown, Hart, & Hare, 1996). Moreover, the current version, the SRP-III, has evidenced a similar four-facet solution ( Williams, Paulhus, & Hare, 2007) to the most recent version of the PCL-R ( Hare, 2003). Comparing the characteristics of non-criminal and criminal psychopaths has also been difficult because research with non-criminals have largely employed self-report measures of various personality (e.g., Mullins-Nelson et al., 2006, Paulhus and Williams, 2002 and Williams et al., 2003) and behavioral dispositions (e.g., Book et al., 2006, Nathanson et al., 2006 and Ross and Rausch, 2001). In contrast, research with criminal psychopaths has been predominantly psychophysiological (Lorber, 2004) and neuropsychological in nature (e.g., Blair et al., 2006b, Hart et al., 1990, LaPierre et al., 1995 and Smith et al., 1992). Neuropsychological research with criminal (i.e., incarcerated), PCL-R-defined psychopaths indicates they do not have an executive dysfunction associated with generalized frontal lobe deficits (Hart et al., 1990 and Smith et al., 1992) but instead exhibit more specific deficits associated with the prefrontal cortex, including the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC; Blair et al., 2006a and LaPierre et al., 1995). Further evidence was presented by Mitchell and colleagues (Mitchell, Colledge, Leonard, & Blair, 2002), who found that compared to non-psychopaths, psychopaths performed poorly on the Iowa Gambling Task, a task sensitive to OFC-associated dysfunction (Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994). However, two studies found no differences between psychopaths and non-psychopaths on the IGT, perhaps because the PCL-R scores in one were below the specified cut-off (Lösel & Schmucker, 2004) and the use of non-standard reward contingencies in the other (Schmitt, Brinkley, & Newman, 1999). Whilst other studies (not using the IGT) have also found evidence indicating criminal psychopaths have an OFC-associated dysfunction (Mitchell et al., 2006), it is not known whether non-criminal psychopaths also exhibit the same deficit. Three neuropsychological studies have been employed using the PCL-R (or PCL-R-derivative) with community-dwelling samples, with mixed findings. Belmore and Quinsey (1994) found that participants with high (compared to low) psychopathy traits with criminal convictions, played significantly more cards on a gambling task, suggesting an executive dysfunction. However, because both groups won similar amounts of money, the authors suggested the high psychopathy group might have utilized an adaptive strategy (Belmore & Quinsey, 1994). In another community study, where 11 of 12 participants were classifiable as psychopaths (Dinn & Harris, 2000), no differences between the high psychopathy group and controls were found on the Wisconsin Card Sort Test (WCST), a ‘traditional’ test of frontal lobe functioning. The third study was conducted by Ishikawa and colleagues (2001), who found that unconvicted psychopaths performed better on the WCST than convicted psychopaths and controls. Coupled with the unconvicted psychopaths’ greater psychophysiological arousal, Ishikawa and colleagues (2001) suggested that a superior executive function might serve as a “protective” factor, decreasing the risk of them engaging in (or being convicted for) illicit behavior/s. In sum, the lack of overlap between the psychopathy measures and experimental tasks used in non-criminal and criminal studies has frustrated attempts to compare the characteristics of these two populations. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to provide the grounds for a more direct comparison between our findings with non-criminal psychopaths and previous findings with criminal psychopaths. In order to do so, the current self-report analogue of the PCL-R, the SRP-III, was employed as the psychopathy measure. Moreover, the Iowa Gambling Task was employed due to its sensitivity to OFC-associated dysfunction and because both non-criminal and criminal psychopaths have shown divergent performance compared to their non-psychopathic counterparts. Additional measures employed included a self-report measure of empathy, a trail-making task as a test of executive functioning and a word-reading task as an IQ estimate. Finally, due to the large sample size recruited, the relationship between psychopathy and the measures employed was investigated using both the entire sample and a sub-sample of participants with low and high psychopathy traits.