Personality assessment inventory (PAI) in forensic and correctional settings: A comprehensive review.

As Forensic Psychology continues to expand as an independent field, professionals regularly resort to psychological assessment tools to assess people involved within the justice system. The Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) is a 344-item, self-report inventory that aims to provide meaningful information for diagnosis and clinical decision-making, specifically relating to psychopathology, personality, and psychosocial environment. Its applicability in forensic settings has been increasingly recognized on account of its benefits in comparison to other self-report inventories (e.g., MMPI-2, MCMI-III), since it includes scales that are relevant to forensic settings (e.g., violence risk levels, psychopathy, substance abuse), and the existence of profile distortion indicators is useful when dealing with highly defensive and/or malingering populations. The goal of this paper is to conduct a thorough review of the PAI's utility in forensic settings, by focusing on the relevant forensic constructs assessed by the PAI (e.g., personality disorders, psychosis, substance abuse, aggression, recidivism risk, and response distortion), as well as its application to offender and inmate populations, intimate partner violence contexts, family law cases, and forensic professionals. Overall, the PAI continues to gather international recognition and its relevance and usefulness in forensic settings is generally accepted and acknowledged.

Psychopathic Traits in a Swedish Court-Ordered Forensic Sample: Preferential Associations of Boldness, Meanness, and Disinhibition.

The construct validity of the triarchic psychopathy model has yet to be evaluated in the Swedish forensic psychiatric context. We examined associations between the three phenotypic constructs of the triarchic model of psychopathy (i.e., boldness, meanness, disinhibition), self-assessed empathy and anxiety, and clinical variables in 91 individuals undergoing pretrial forensic psychiatric evaluation in Sweden. Participants completed the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure (TriPM) and self-report measures of empathy and anxiety. Clinical variables, including psychiatric diagnoses and criminal behavior, were collected from the forensic psychiatric evaluations (FPE). All three subscales of the TriPM displayed significant and predominantly anticipated correlations with empathy and trait anxiety measures. TriPM Disinhibition was the only subscale with significant associations with the clinical variables collected from the FPEs. The results provide evidence for the reliability and construct validity of the Swedish translation of the TriPM in a pretrial forensic setting.

Triarchic psychopathy and affective picture processing: An event-related potential study.

Psychopathy and its precursors appear to be associated with abnormal affective response. For example, individuals high in psychopathy show reduced psychophysiological response to unpleasant stimuli, which might explain low levels of empathy in psychopathic individuals, and their pursuit of individual goals without regard for others' wellbeing. In keeping with the notion that psychopathology is best represented on a continuum, the triarchic model suggests that psychopathy is characterized by elevations on three traits: boldness, meanness and disinhibition. Understanding how these traits relate to psychophysiological response to emotional stimuli would help validate the triarchic model, while also bridging to other psychopathological spectra (e.g., internalizing psychopathology, which is characterized by low boldness). Here, N = 123 young adults passively viewed unpleasant, pleasant and neutral pictures while subjective and electrocortical response were recorded. Controlling for the other triarchic traits, individuals with higher self-reported meanness had smaller late positive potentials (LPPs) to both pleasant and unpleasant pictures, whereas individuals higher in boldness had larger LPPs to unpleasant pictures. In addition, those higher in meanness rated unpleasant pictures as more pleasant and less emotionally arousing. Disinhibition was not associated with the LPP or ratings. Meanness appears to drive blunted response to unpleasant pictures that has previously been observed among those high on psychopathy, and may also be associated with reduced engagement with generic pleasant stimuli. Moreover, results converge with prior work on other traits of transdiagnostic relevance (e.g., extraversion), as well as internalizing symptoms, providing a bridge between psychopathy and other forms of psychopathology.

Development of an Inconsistent Responding Scale for the HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised.

Inconsistent or careless responding is a significant threat to the validity of self-reported personality data. Using archival samples of undergraduate and community participants, we developed an inconsistent responding scale using items that appear on both the 60- and 100-item versions of the HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised-two widely used measures of the HEXACO model of personality trait structure. We identified pairs of correlated HEXACO items in Sample 1 and created a total inconsistent responding score by summing absolute differences between each item pair. The Brief Response Inconsistency Evaluation (BRIE) for the HEXACO effectively differentiated between genuine and randomly generated responses across samples. The BRIE also correlated as expected with other measures of careless responding and relevant personality traits (e.g., conscientiousness). Tentative cut scores for the BRIE that appear to provide a reasonable balance between sensitivity and specificity in Sample 1 were investigated. Future research should examine the BRIE with different populations and translations of the HEXACO inventories and further investigate the effectiveness of the recommended cut scores.

A Comparison of Two Five-Factor Model Operationalizations of the Triarchic Model of Psychopathy in a Clinical Sample.

Structural models of personality traits, particularly the five-factor model (FFM), continue to inform ongoing debates regarding what personality attributes and trait domains are central to psychopathy. A growing body of literature has linked the constructs of the triarchic model of psychopathy (boldness, meanness, disinhibition) to the FFM. Recently, researchers developed both item and regression-based measures of the triarchic model of psychopathy using the NEO Personality Inventory-Revised-a popular measure of the FFM. The current study examines the correlates of these two FFM-derived operationalizations of the triarchic model using data from the Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Disorders Study. The two approaches had strong convergent validity coefficients and similar patterns of criterion-related validity coefficients. Meanness related to greater personality pathology characterized by exploitation of others and poor attachment, whereas disinhibition related to indicators of greater negative affect and poor behavioral constraint. Boldness related to reduced negative affect and greater narcissistic personality traits. Although the item and regression-based approaches showed similar patterns of associations with criterion-variables, the item-based approach has some practical and psychometric advantages over the regression-based approach given strong correlations between the meanness and disinhibition scores from the regression approach.

The Personality Assessment Inventory in U.S. Case Law: A Survey and Examination of Relevance to Legal Proceedings.

The Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI), a popular measure of personality, psychopathology, and interpersonal functioning, has demonstrated utility to address various psycholegal questions. This case law review examines a large sample of randomly selected published U.S. case law decisions to ascertain how the PAI has been applied and considered by legal decision makers. The review indicates the instrument is popular in criminal and civil legal settings, particularly in preadjudication forensic mental health evaluations (e.g., competency to proceed) and cases considering social security disability benefits. Forensic evaluators and legal actors primarily consider the results of the PAI as indicators of examinee impression management, psychopathology, and interpersonal functioning, although this varied by psycholegal context. The admissibility of the instrument was rarely challenged, although some challenges to the forensic evaluator's interpretation and conclusions emerged. Despite the PAI's popularity, the utility of the instrument is determined by specific, empirically supported, contexts. As such, forensic evaluators must consider how the PAI may inform decision making given examinee characteristics and the psycholegal question.

Taking "the boss" into the real world: Field interrater reliability of the Short-Term Assessment of Risk and Treatability: Adolescent Version.

There is emerging evidence that the performance of risk assessment instruments is weaker when used for clinical decision-making than for research purposes. For instance, research has found lower agreement between evaluators when the risk assessments are conducted during routine practice. We examined the field interrater reliability of the Short-Term Assessment of Risk and Treatability: Adolescent Version (START:AV). Clinicians in a Dutch secure youth care facility completed START:AV assessments as part of the treatment routine. Consistent with previous literature, interrater reliability of the items and total scores was lower than previously reported in non-field studies. Nevertheless, moderate to good interrater reliability was found for final risk judgments on most adverse outcomes. Field studies provide insights into the actual performance of structured risk assessment in real-world settings, exposing factors that affect reliability. This information is relevant for those who wish to implement structured risk assessment with a level of reliability that is defensible considering the high stakes.

Can the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality Be Used to Measure the Triarchic Model Constructs of Boldness, Meanness, and Disinhibition? A Scale Derivation Study.

Can the components of the triarchic model of psychopathy (i.e., boldness, meanness, disinhibition) be operationalized using the item pool comprising the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP) model? To address this question, the authors first derived CAPP-based triarchic scales using standard item-selection procedures and then examined the external correlates of these provisional scales in three archival data sets: (a) U.S. jail inmates administered the institutional rating scale version of the CAPP and (b and c) prototypicality ratings of the CAPP traits provided by Swedish forensic mental health professionals and U.S. probation officers. Although most research on triarchic constructs has relied exclusively on self-report inventories, the results suggest that the CAPP model can be reorganized to reflect boldness, meanness, and disinhibition and that its institutional rating scale items can effectively quantify these constructs using interview and file review data. Implications for future research on the measurement and assessment of psychopathic traits are discussed.

Latent variable modeling of item-based factor scales: Comment on Triarchic or septarchic?-Uncovering the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure's (TriPM) Structure, by Roy et al.

We critique Roy et al.'s (2020; this issue) approach to characterizing the item-level factor structure of the three scales of the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure (TriPM), in light of the manner in which the TriPM scales were developed, the purposes they were designed to serve, and the growing body of evidence supporting their construct validity. We focus on three major points: (1) The TriPM scales are item-based factor scales - i.e., item sets designed to index broad factors of larger multi-scale (parent) inventories; (2) item-level structural analysis can be useful for representing broad dimensions tapped by such scales, but it cannot be expected to provide an accurate picture of narrower subdimensions (facets) assessed by their parent inventories; and (3) it is critical to consider the nomological networks of the TriPM scales (and other triarchic scale measures) in appraising their effectiveness as operationalizations of the triarchic model constructs. We illustrate the first and second of these points by applying Roy et al.'s analytic approach to the trait scales of the NEO-FFI, which were developed to index broad personality dimensions of the multi-scale NEO-PI-R. We address the third point with reference to the growing body of literature supporting the construct validity of the TriPM scales and demonstrating their utility for advancing an integrative understanding of psychopathy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Suicidal ideation across race in a justice-involved sample: An item response theory approach.

OBJECTIVES: Compared to community samples, rates of suicide are much higher in forensic and correctional settings, yet limited research has focused on the development and improvement of suicide assessment methods used in such contexts. Moreover, despite evidence that suicide assessment varies across Caucasians and African Americans, to our knowledge this important issue has received little attention within higher risk correctional samples. We used Item Response Theory and Differential Item Functioning analyses to address this gap within the literature. METHOD: Specifically, we examined the psychometric properties of the Suicidal Ideation scale of the Personality Assessment Inventory (Morey, 2007) in a large sample of justice-involved individuals. RESULTS: Caucasians report greater suicidal ideation compared to African American participants on average. However, after controlling for mean differences, Caucasians and African Americans differentially endorsed symptoms of suicidal ideation. If the level of suicidal ideation is held constant across racial categories, Caucasians underreported suicidal ideation relative to African Americans. CONCLUSION: Results suggest a nuanced picture of suicidal ideation across racial categories that can be informed by Item Response Theory approaches to scale construction and refinement.

Classification accuracy of the rare symptoms and symptom combinations scales of the Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology in three archival samples.

OBJECTIVE: The Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology (SIMS; Widows & Smith, 2005) is a 75-item self-report measure intended to screen for potentially feigned symptoms of mental illness and/or cognitive impairment. We investigated the classification accuracy of 2 new detection scales (Rare Symptoms [RS] and Symptom Combinations [SC]) developed by Rogers, Robinson, and Gillard (2014) that appeared useful in identifying simulated mental disorder in their derivation sample of psychiatric inpatients. HYPOTHESIS: We hypothesized that the rates of classification accuracy Rogers et al. reported for these 2 scales would generalize to other samples in which the utility of the SIMS previously has been investigated. METHOD: We computed RS and SC scores from archival SIMS data collected as part of 3 research projects investigating malingering detection methods: (a) general population prison inmates and inmates in a prison psychiatric unit receiving treatment for mental disorder (N = 115), (b) college students (N = 196), and (3) community-dwelling adults (N = 48). RESULTS: Results supported the global classification accuracy of RS and SC but the suggested cut-score for both scales (>6) produced poor sensitivity. Lower potential cut-offs did, however, improve sensitivity to feigning somewhat while not excessively diminishing specificity. CONCLUSION: These results emphasize the importance of generalizability research when investigating the clinical utility of forensic mental health assessment methods, particularly specific decision rules used to classify individuals into discrete categories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Temporal stability and dynamic convergence of the Personality Assessment Screener in a prison sample.

Although the Personality Assessment Screener (PAS; Morey, 1997) has garnered substantial research interest, the measure's temporal stability and sensitivity to change have remained largely uninvestigated. The present study employs a dynamic approach to investigating the convergent and discriminant validity of the PAS by examining relationships between temporal changes on the PAS and changes on external criterion measures, thereby exploring the extent to which changes on the PAS offer meaningful information regarding changes in psychological functioning. Data were obtained from a public dataset funded by the United States Department of Justice in which male inmates were administered various psychological measures at 5 time points spanning the course of a year. The PAS demonstrated appreciable stability across all testing intervals and the full study period, and temporal changes on the PAS correlated as expected with changes on both conceptually similar and distinct external criterion measures. These findings offer evidence to suggest that temporal variations across testing intervals are not fully explained by error, as conceptualized in classical test-retest analyses, but rather may indicate meaningful changes in functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

A Comparison of the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory (YPI)-Triarchic Scales and the YPI in a Sample of Justice-Involved Youth.

The Triarchic model (Patrick, Fowles, & Krueger, 2009) posits that psychopathy consists of three elements: Boldness, Meanness, and Disinhibition. Drislane et al. (2015) recently derived scales from the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory (YPI; Andershed, Kerr, Stattin, & Levander, 2002) to assess these traits. The initial validation efforts appeared promising, but researchers have yet to evaluate these scales among justice-involved youth. The current study examines the validity of the YPI-Triarchic scales in an archival sample of 928 male adolescent offenders and tests whether the new scales provide information incremental to the original YPI. The YPI-Triarchic scales were strongly correlated with original YPI scales (rs = .56-.96), and some associations were contrary to predictions and previous findings about the Triarchic model (e.g., YPI-Boldness was not inversely related to symptomatology). Thus, caution is warranted when attempting to study the Triarchic model with the YPI-Triarchic scales.

Dangerous, depraved, and death-worthy: A meta-analysis of the correlates of perceived psychopathy in jury simulation studies.

OBJECTIVES: Experimental research suggests that legal defendants described as psychopathic are generally, although not uniformly, judged more negatively and punitively. Understanding the correlates of perceived psychopathy, regardless of exposure to mental health evidence, is an important step towards clarifying divergent findings. METHOD: We conducted a quantitative synthesis of ten juror simulation studies (combined N = 2,980) examining the meta-analytic association between perceived defendant psychopathy and various psychologically important and legally relevant outcomes. RESULTS: Perceiving someone as being more psychopathic was associated with viewing that defendant as more dangerous (r W = 0.31) and evil ( r W = 0.44). Moreover, perceptions of defendant psychopathy predicted greater support for more adverse consequences in terms of capital sentencing ( r W = 0.22) and sentence length ( r W = 0.27), although not perceived treatment amenability ( r W = 0.09). CONCLUSIONS: These findings highlight the importance of including ratings of perceived psychopathy in experimental designs to identify the circumstances under which psychopathy evidence might prejudicially impact case outcomes.

Triarchic psychopathy and deficits in facial affect recognition.

OBJECTIVE: Impaired socialization due to amygdala dysfunction has been proposed as a factor underlying psychopathy. Supporting this hypothesis, some research indicates that psychopathy is associated with deficits in facial affect recognition, but other studies have failed to find such a relationship. This study investigated whether healthy young adults elevated in psychopathic traits displayed deficits in identifying facial affective displays overall as well as deficits specific to fear recognition. METHOD: Facial affect recognition was measured in a sample of 110 undergraduate men (n = 36) and women (n = 74). Participants completed the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure, and participants' eye gaze was measured using ASL Eye Trac 6. The facial affect recognition task was created using the NimStim facial expression stimuli. RESULTS: Individuals elevated in psychopathic traits did not display deficits in recognition of emotional faces overall or for fearful faces compared to individuals lower in psychopathic traits. However, meanness was negatively correlated with fear identification. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that deficient emotion processing in psychopathic individuals may be specific to ambiguous affective expressions. We discuss implications for the study of psychopathy and emotion processing.

Detecting Inconsistent Responding on the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory-Short Form.

The Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory-Short Form (YPI-S) is a convenient measure for assessing psychopathy in settings with constraints on resources. However, the YPI-S does not contain a means of detecting careless or random response styles. The present study describes the development and evaluation of an inconsistent responding scale for the YPI-S using five archival samples that vary in language (English, German, Italian, Dutch) and other participant characteristics (juvenile offenders, adolescent students). Inconsistency scores resulting from the new scale effectively distinguished genuine participant responses from randomly generated cases (area under the ROC curve [AUC] = .85-.90) and from cases in which 50% of original responses were replaced with random data (AUC = .75-.82). The associations between the YPI-S and theoretically relevant correlates were reduced among participants exceeding proposed cutoff scores for profile validity compared with associations among more consistent respondents.

Examining the utility of the Personality Assessment Screener in three criminal justice samples.

Many individuals in forensic/correctional settings experience significant mental health problems, yet effective screening tools to identify such difficulties are in relatively short supply. This study investigates the clinical utility of the Personality Assessment Screener (PAS; Morey, 1997), a 22-item self-report measure of risk for emotional and behavioral dysfunction, across three archival criminal justice samples (incarcerated sex offenders, prison inmates housed in general population and psychiatric units, and jail detainees). The PAS is derived from the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; Morey, 1991, 2007), a more comprehensive measure of emotional and behavioral disturbances that is widely used in forensic/correctional settings. The PAS total score effectively identified those with clinically significant elevations on the PAI and also significantly correlated with various criterion measures tapping psychological dysfunction. Existing interpretive ranges and labels used to describe PAS scores in general clinical settings were problematic, however, and may require revision for use in these contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Development and initial validation of the HEXACO-Triarchic scales.

The Triarchic Model posits that psychopathic personality traits are captured by three dimensions-boldness, meanness, and disinhibition. Recent findings indicate considerable overlap between the Triarchic constructs and the six-factor HEXACO (honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience) model of normal personality traits (Ruchensky & Donnellan, 2017). The current study describes the development and validation of Triarchic proxy scales drawn from the HEXACO-100 item pool (Lee & Ashton, 2016) using two large undergraduate samples (Ns = 545, 398) and a community sample from MTurk (N = 391). The HEXACO-Triarchic scales were strongly correlated with other Triarchic measures and showed theoretically predicted relations with criterion variables. The HEXACO-Triarchic scales also appear to have greater discrimination between the three Triarchic dimensions compared with alternative measures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Initial development of pathological personality trait domain measures using the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI).

This study set out to create measures of the five personality disorder trait domains outlined in Section III of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) from the Personality Assessment Inventory items (Morey, 2007). Rasch rating scale model analyses and classical test theory analyses were applied to existing data sets (N = 3,877; community, clinical, offender, college) to identify relevant items. Five scales were created that had acceptable unidimensionality and generally conformed to Rasch model expectations. The ability of the items to cover the underlying construct and their differential item function by sex were acceptable, though a few of the proposed scales had weaknesses in these areas. Internal consistency was acceptable for all scales and the factor structure was generally consistent with expectations, but some scales had concerning cross-loadings. Preliminary analyses demonstrated validity of the scales in relation to history of mental health treatment/current symptoms, substance abuse, and, for one scale, violent rearrests. There were small-to-moderate associations with noncorresponding traits, suggesting a degree of saturation with general personality impairment. The relevance of the proposed scales for the assessment of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition personality disorder is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).