Psychological Criminology: Personality and Psychopathy

A relatively enduring pattern of thoughts, emotions, motivations, and behaviors that influences how an individual responds to situations.

The perspective that personality can be described through relatively stable dimensions on which individuals differ.

Openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Higher agreeableness and conscientiousness, although these are statistical associations rather than guarantees.

A tendency toward organization, self-discipline, responsibility, and goal-directed behavior.

A tendency toward cooperation, compassion, consideration, and interpersonal trust.

A tendency to experience negative emotions such as anxiety, irritability, and emotional instability.

Hans J. Eysenck.

A historical personality dimension involving traits such as aggressiveness, tough-mindedness, and low empathy; it is not equivalent to psychosis.

He suggested that biologically influenced personality traits and differences in conditioning could affect socialization and behavioral restraint.

A constellation of interpersonal, affective, and behavioral traits that may include manipulativeness, shallow affect, callousness, and persistent antisocial tendencies.

Robert D. Hare.

Psychopathy Checklist-Revised.

To assess psychopathic traits using a structured rating procedure based on interview information and collateral records.

It assesses characteristics and behavioral history, not whether a person committed a particular charged offense.

A clinical diagnosis involving a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of others' rights, subject to specified diagnostic criteria.

Psychopathy emphasizes particular affective and interpersonal traits alongside behavior, while antisocial personality disorder is a formal diagnosis emphasizing a persistent pattern of antisocial conduct.

No. They overlap but are distinct constructs with different assessment frameworks.

A childhood or adolescent behavioral disorder involving a repetitive and persistent pattern of violating others' rights or major age-appropriate rules.

A childhood behavioral disorder characterized by a persistent pattern of angry or irritable mood, argumentative or defiant behavior, or vindictiveness.

Developmental outcomes vary, and protective factors, treatment, maturation, and changing environments can alter behavioral trajectories.

A pattern involving limited empathy, reduced guilt, and diminished concern about others' feelings or performance, assessed within a developmental context.

A biased or inaccurate pattern of interpreting information that can affect judgment, emotion, and behavior.

A tendency to interpret ambiguous actions by others as intentionally threatening or hostile.

A process through which individuals justify harmful behavior or reduce personal responsibility for its consequences.

Albert Bandura.

Viewing other people as less than fully human, thereby weakening moral restraints against harming them.

Attributing responsibility for one's harmful actions to an authority figure or another external source.

Reducing perceived personal accountability by spreading responsibility across a group.

Making harmful conduct appear acceptable by comparing it with more extreme misconduct.

The historical proposal that frustration creates a tendency toward aggression, later refined to recognize that aggression is neither inevitable nor the only possible response.

John Dollard and colleagues.

Leonard Berkowitz.

An integrative framework explaining aggression through interactions among personal characteristics, situational factors, cognition, affect, arousal, and decision processes.

Aggression occurring primarily in response to perceived threat, provocation, frustration, or emotional arousal.

Aggression used instrumentally to achieve a goal, obtain a reward, or control another person.

Reactive aggression is primarily defensive or emotionally triggered, whereas proactive aggression is primarily goal-directed or instrumental.

John Bowlby.

A developmental framework examining how early caregiver relationships influence emotional security, relationship expectations, and regulation.

Mary Ainsworth.

Secure, insecure-avoidant, insecure-resistant or ambivalent, and disorganized attachment.

Attachment patterns are not deterministic, and later development depends on many biological, social, and environmental influences.

Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi.

Low self-control, interacting with opportunities, increases the likelihood of impulsive and immediately rewarding offending.

The ability to postpone an immediate reward in favor of a potentially greater future benefit.

Adversity can be associated with increased risk through multiple developmental pathways, but it does not determine criminal behavior.

An approach recognizing the possible effects of trauma while emphasizing safety, respectful interaction, appropriate support, and avoidance of unnecessary retraumatization.

Risk assessment estimates the likelihood of specified future outcomes under defined conditions; guilt determination concerns evidence of a particular alleged offense.

Moral disengagement through victim blaming or attribution of blame.

Hostile attribution bias, potentially contributing to reactive aggression.