Heterogeneity of adaptive features among psychopathy variants

The computational psychiatry of antisocial behaviour and psychopathy

Antisocial behaviours such as disobedience, lying, stealing, destruction of property, and aggression towards others are common to multiple disorders of childhood and adulthood, including conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, psychopathy, and antisocial personality disorder. These disorders have a significant negative impact for individuals and for society, but whether they represent clinically different phenomena, or simply different approaches to diagnosing the same underlying psychopathology is highly debated. Computational psychiatry, with its dual focus on identifying different classes of disorder and health (data-driven) and latent cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms (theory-driven), is well placed to address these questions. The elucidation of mechanisms that might characterise latent processes across different disorders of antisocial behaviour can also provide important advances. In this review, we critically discuss the contribution of computational research to our understanding of various antisocial behaviour disorders, and highlight suggestions for how computational psychiatry can address important clinical and scientific questions about these disorders in the future.

Variants of psychopathic personality in Korean and UK incarcerated offenders: Using latent profile analysis and discriminant analysis

Since the popularization of the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), research on the construct of psychopathy has drastically increased. However, there has been little research examining the extent to which psychopathy varies across different cultures. This study is the first to use latent profile analysis to examine cultural variations in psychopathic traits between large samples of male inmates in Korean (n = 1102) and UK (n = 1316) prisons. Supplementary discriminate analysis was also used to validate the classification profiles and determine which items of the PCL-R were most important in defining the differences or similarities between each of the classes in the two large samples. Based on the analysis, two variants of primary psychopathy could be distinguished in the Korean sample but not in the UK sample. Conversely, only secondary psychopathy was identified in the UK sample. This result was also confirmed by supplementary analysis, which verified classification accuracy and also provided structure matrixes listing the correlations between each PCL-R item and the two discriminant functions. Our results point to the possibility of cultural differences in the structure of psychopathy and provide practical implications for clinical assessment and diagnosis.

What makes a "successful" psychopath? Longitudinal trajectories of offenders' antisocial behavior and impulse control as a function of psychopathy

Psychopathy is a considerable risk factor for violent behavior. However, many psychopathic individuals refrain from antisocial and criminal acts. The mechanisms underlying the formation of this "successful" phenotype are uncertain. We tested a compensatory model of "successful" psychopathy, which posits that relatively "successful" psychopathic individuals develop greater conscientious traits that serve to inhibit their heightened antisocial impulses. To test this model, we examined the 7-year longitudinal Research on Pathways to Desistance study of 1,354 adjudicated adolescents. Higher initial psychopathy was associated with steeper increases in general inhibitory control and the inhibition of aggression over time. This effect was magnified among "successful" offenders (i.e., those who reoffended less). These findings support our compensatory model, suggesting that psychopathic individuals who develop greater self-regulatory control over their antisocial impulses become relatively more "successful" than their less regulated counterparts. Moreover, our results speak of the importance of the five-factor model for understanding psychopathy and the crucial role of conscientiousness in the form that psychopathic individuals take. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).