Introduction and validation of Psychopathic Personality Traits Scale (PPTS) in a large prison sample

Purpose: The aim of this study was to create and validate a brief self-report scale of psychopathic personality traits for research purposes which would grasp the essence of a psychopathic personality, regardless of respondents’ age, gender, cultural background, and criminal history. Methods: The Psychopathic Personality Traits Scale (PPTS), The Measure of Criminal Social Identity, Self-Esteem Measure for Criminals, The Child Sexual Abuse Myth Scale, Attitudes Towards Male Sexual Dating Violence, and Lie Scale were administered to 1,794 prisoners systematically sampled from 10 maximum- and medium-security prisons. Dimensionality and construct validity of the PPTS was investigated using traditional CFA techniques, along with confirmatory bifactor analysis and multitrait-multimethod modelling (MTMM). Seven alternative models of the PPTS were specified and tested using Mplus with WLSMV estimation. Results: MTMM model of PPTS offered the best representation of the data. The results suggest that the PPTS consists of four subscales (affective responsiveness, cognitive responsiveness, interpersonal manipulation, and egocentricity) while controlling for two method factors (knowledge/skills and attitudes/beliefs). Good composite reliability and differential predictive validity was observed. Conclusion: This brief measure of psychopathic traits uncontaminated with behavioural items can be used in the same way among participants with and without criminal history

Using Service-Learning to Educate Students about Stakeholder Involvement

Using Lee’s definition of service-learning as “an instructional method in which students learn course content by actively participating in thoughtfully organized service experiences related to that content”, this article offers a case of action-oriented service- learning. It shows one way to combine traditional teaching methods with an action-oriented approach to service-learning that benefits both the community and imparts critical know-how into the education of planning students. Through service-learning students acquire valuable skills and also increase their competence as practitioners and increase their confidence in their field in a way that nurtures their abilities and provides minimal risk to the clientele because the students are working under the guidance of faculty. As previous research from diverse fields have shown, service-learning benefits the students and the groups they encounter through their projects. KEYWORDSservice-learning, civic engagement, community developmen

Do core interpersonal and affective traits of PCL-R psychopathy interact with antisocial behavior and disinhibition to predict violence?

The utility of psychopathy measures in predicting violence is largely explained by their assessment of social deviance (e.g., antisocial behavior; disinhibition). A key question is whether social deviance interacts with the core interpersonal-affective traits of psychopathy to predict violence. Do core psychopathic traits multiply the (already high) risk of violence among disinhibited individuals with a dense history of misbehavior? This meta-analysis of 32 effect sizes (N ϭ 10,555) tested whether an interaction between the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; R. D. Hare, 2003) InterpersonalAffective and Social Deviance scales predicted violence beyond the simple additive effects of each scale. Results indicate that Social Deviance is more uniquely predictive of violence (d ϭ .40) than Interpersonal-Affective traits (d ϭ .11), and these two scales do not interact (d ϭ .00) to increase power in predicting violence. In fact, Social Deviance alone would predict better than the InterpersonalAffective scale and any interaction in 81% and 96% of studies, respectively. These findings have fundamental practical implications for risk assessment and theoretical implications for some conceptualizations of psychopathy

Offenders with mental disorder have criminogenic needs, too: Toward recidivism reduction.

Many programs for offenders with mental illness (OMIs) seem to assume that serious mental illness directly causes criminal justice involvement. To help evaluate this assumption, we assessed a matched sample of 221 parolees with and without mental illness and then followed them for over 1 year to track recidivism. First, compared with their relatively healthy counterparts, OMIs were equally likely to be rearrested, but were more likely to return to prison custody. Second, beyond risk factors unique to mental illness (e.g., acute symptoms; operationalized with part of the Historical-Clinical-Risk Management-20; Webster, Douglas, Eaves, & Hart, 1997), OMIs also had significantly more general risk factors for recidivism (e.g., antisocial pattern; operationalized with the Level of Service/Case Management Inventory; Andrews, Bonta, & Wormith, 2004) than offenders without mental illness. Third, these general risk factors significantly predicted recidivism, with no incremental utility added by risk factors unique to mental illness. Implications for broadening the policy model to explicitly target general risk factors for recidivism such as antisocial traits are discussed