Personality Characteristics Of The Psychopath example essay topic

is known to exist as a constellation of behavioral, emotional and personality characteristics including impulsivity, flattened affect, callousness, glibness, and diverse criminal history and diversity (Hare, 19 XX; Cleckley, 19 XX). The 'gold standard' for diagnosing psychopathic personalities is the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (Hare, 19 XX), which is based on Cleckley's original description of the psychopath. This tool has been shown to hold a considerable amount of predictive and diagnostic utility, and has furthered the field of psychopathic research to an intangible degree. Nonetheless, despite defining the psychopath as an individual with a conglomeration of personality, affective and behavioral abnormalities, very little is understood about the psychopathic personality, per se. A handful of studies have been completed to investigate the personality characteristics of the psychopath, however, most of these studies have suffered from small subject sizes. For instance, Harper, Hare and, 19 XX utilized the NEO-PI and determined that psychopaths showed heightened levels of XX and XX.

Unfortunately this study only utilized XX number of participants, however, limiting the extent to which the findings can be relied on, or generalized to the psychopathic community at large. More recently, Lynam et al (19 XX) performed a far more rigorous investigation into the five-factor composite of the psychopathic personality, and determined that the psychopath demonstrated high XX, low XX, and lower XX. This should be expected, as the psychopath has always been considered to be a callous, unemotional and inconsiderate persona. The present study sought, in part, to further research in this area by investigating the five-factor composite of 85 individuals who completed Levenson's self-report psychopathy scale.

This scale has been shown to evince a commendable amount of reliability and validity, and has been shown to correlate with XX and XX. OR Psychopathy is known to exist as a constellation of behavioral, emotional and personality characteristics including impulsivity, flattened affect, callousness, glibness, and diverse criminal history and diversity (Hare, 19 XX; Cleckley, 19 XX). For instance, individuals who score above 30 on the PCL-R have been shown to demonstrate increased levels of XX, XX, XX, XX and XX. In addition, these individuals have been consistently shown to demonstrate disabilities learning on passive avoidance tasks. That is, psychopaths appear to have an extremely difficult time learning to withhold a behavior in order to avoid punishment.

This characteristic of the psychopathic personality has been demonstrated on numerous occasions, and has been used to explain the fact that psychopaths have a difficult time staying on the correct side of the law. For a number of reasons, a number of self-report psychopathy measures have made their way to the scene over the past ten years. First, use of the PCL-R is difficult in non-institutionalized samples, because it is an extremely time-consuming procedure that generally relies fairly heavily on past case history. Second, the diagnostic utility of the PCL-R in non-institutionalized samples remains somewhat unknown. That is, it seems quite possible that significant differences exist between institutionalized and non-institutionalized psychopaths. Intelligence, for one, may play a role, in that the more intelligent psychopaths may be less likely to get caught.

But the differences may be more extreme than that as well. That is, non-institutional psychopaths may, in fact, lead extremely productive and successful lives. The most common self-report psychopathy measures include the PPI, the SPR, the LSRP, and the PCL-SD. Each has been shown to hold a significant amount of predictive and diagnostic predictability, and each has been shown to share predictive ability with the PCL-R. The LSRP, in particular, has received a fair amount of recent attention and experimental investigation. The advantage of the LSRP is that it claims to break down into the same two original factors as the PCL-R. Newman, Brinkley, etc (20 XX) have shown that the LSRP predicts XX (passive avoidance? ), and Lynam et al have shown that individuals scoring high on the SLIP show predictable scores on the big-five personality inventory (ie. Low C, low A, high E).

The present study sought to further investigate the predictive validity of the LSRP by investigating its ability to predict passive avoidance learning and big-five scores. I'm going to leave the rest here, because I have to see exactly what I have, what I've said, and what others have said in the past. But there is no question that I made some headway. I mean... almost 2 pages already. Not bad for a drunken half-hour's work..