Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Jennifer L. Lilienfeld is the co-developer of the Psychopathic Personality Inventory — Revised and receives royalties for the sales of this measure, which is published by Psychological Assessment Resources.
The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised PCL-R; Hare, , is often used to assess risk of violence, perhaps based on the assumption that it captures emotionally detached individuals who are driven to prey upon others. This study is designed to assess the relation between a core interpersonal and affective traits of psychopathy and impulsive antisociality on the one hand, and b the risk of future violence, and patterns of motivation for past violence, on the other.
Then, a second, independent research team assessed offenders' lifetime patterns of violence and its motivation. Baseline and follow-up assessments included both interviews and reviews of official records. First, the PPI manifested incremental validity in predicting future violence over the PCL-R but not vice versa — and most of its predictive power derived solely from impulsive antisociality.
Second, impulsive antisociality — not interpersonal and affective traits specific to psychopathy — were uniquely associated with instrumental lifetime patterns of past violence.
The latter psychopathic traits are narrowly associated with deficits in motivation for violence e. These findings and their consistency with some past research advise against broad generalizations about the relation between psychopathy and violence.
