What is Psychopathy?

This video answers the question: What is psychopathy? When we talk about psychopathy, a lot of times we think of the diagnosis that we see in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: antisocial personality disorder. These two constructs, psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder, are similar and some would argue the really the same thing, but I usually think of them as distinct. I think the research supports this perspective fairly well. We could think of psychopathy as having all the characteristics we would expect to see with antisocial personality plus characteristics from other domains, specifically interpersonal and affective domains. To understand antisocial personality disorder we look in the DSM and we see that there are seven symptom criteria and then three other criteria. Of the seven symptom criteria, three would have to be met for a diagnosis. The seven symptom criteria are violating social norms, lying, impulsivity, irritability and aggression, disregarding others’ safety, irresponsibility, and lack of remorse. Those symptoms would have to be present since the age of 15. Then we have the other criteria. An individual has to be 18 years or older, evidence of conduct disorder would have had to have been present before the age of 15, and the symptoms of antisocial personality disorder can't occur exclusively during the course of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. We can see from this definition of antisocial personality it would be hard to conceptualize a presentation of psychopathy that didn't also qualify as antisocial personality disorder, and in fact this is how we usually think of it. We think of psychopathy as a subset of antisocial personality disorder, so that almost all of individuals who had psychopathy would qualify for antisocial personality disorder and a number of individuals with antisocial personality disorder would qualify for psychopathy, but not all of them. A number of the studies on antisocial personality and psychopathy look at male criminal offenders in the prison population. Here we see that around 70 – 80 % percent of those individuals qualify for a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, but only about 15-25% could be classified as having psychopathy.