Personality-based assessment of psychopathy: Comparison of the comprehensive assessment of psychopathic personality and the elemental psychopathy assessment.

Psychopathic personality disorder (PPD) is a widely researched construct characterized by severe dysfunction in affective, interpersonal and behavioral domains. Inconsistencies across different theoretical formulations and operationalizations have major implications for research and practice. Two separate personality-based perspectives of psychopathy have been proposed, one anchored within the influential five factor model (FFM) of personality and the comprehensive assessment of psychopathic personality (CAPP) model, which was specifically designed as an inclusive concept map of PPD. The current study evaluated the empirical overlap between the CAPP and the FFM-based models of psychopathy to determine the convergences and divergences in providing a personality-based perspective on psychopathy. Participants were undergraduate students (n = 924) who completed the CAPP-Self-Report (CAPP-SR) and the Elemental Psychopathy Assessment-Short Form (EPA-SF). Results indicated significant convergent validity associations between CAPP-SR scales and conceptually relevant EPA-SF scales (range = .30-.74; median discriminant associations range = .10-.36). Furthermore, an exploratory factor analysis supported the conceptual overlap between the CAPP-SR and EPA-SF scales as representing personality-based models of psychopathy, yielding a 4-factor structure that reflected antagonism, disinhibition, emotional stability, and narcissism. Overall, the findings support the convergence of the CAPP and FFM-based PPD models, at both a basic trait and higher order level. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Factor structure of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality-Self-Report (CAPP-SR) in community and offender samples.

The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality-Self-Report (CAPP-SR) is a recent operationalization of the CAPP model, which conceptualizes psychopathy in terms of 33 symptoms that can be thematically organized according to six theoretical domains. The current study examined the higher order factor structure of the CAPP-SR symptom scales in community, university, and offender samples derived from three separate countries. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) indicated that a three-factor model (Antagonism/Meanness, Disinhibition, and Fearless Grandiosity) was optimal in a large population-representative U.S. community sample. EFA with targeted rotation confirmed this three-factor structure in New Zealand university and Lithuanian prison samples. Furthermore, construct validity analyses against other psychopathy measures and psychopathy-relevant criteria provided initial support for the three CAPP-SR latent factors. For instance, CAPP-SR Antagonism/Meanness was associated with other psychopathy scales reflective of antagonism, meanness, callous affect; CAPP-SR Disinhibition with other psychopathy scales reflective of behavioral psychopathy traits (e.g., impulsivity, irresponsibility), antisocial behavior, substance abuse; and CAPP-SR Fearless Grandiosity with narcissism, emotional stability, and boldness. These findings suggest that a three-factor structure provides for an alternative (to the traditional thematic domains) hierarchical interpretation of CAPP-SR scores. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).