A Prototypicality Validation of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality Model (CAPP)

Abstract

Cooke and colleagues recently developed the lexically based model of psychopathy named the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP, Cooke, Hart, Logan, & Michie, 2004). The current study was the first to evaluate aspects of the validity of a translated version of the CAPP model, which comprises 33 symptoms from six domains of personality functioning. Prototypicality ratings from 796 Norwegian community residents, forensic mental health professionals, and corrections professionals were obtained. Most CAPP symptoms were evaluated as highly prototypical of psychopathy by all three groups. Symptoms from the Self, Dominance, and Attachment domains were perceived as more prototypical than those from the Behavioral domain. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) indicated that two CAPP domains were unidimensional whereas evidence of unidimensionality was somewhat weaker for the other domains, but improved substantially after removal of problematic symptoms. Overall, the findings support the content validity of the CAPP model. This may have relevance to the current considerations regarding reformulation of the criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder in DSM-V.

Boldness and its relation to psychopathic personality: Prototypicality analyses among forensic mental health, criminal justice, and layperson raters.

“…This prototypicality protocol has been used to investigate the content validity of the CAPP model in several large-scale samples (Hoff et al, 2012(Hoff et al, , 2014Kreis et al, 2012) that have surveyed mental health researchers and practitioners, correctional personnel, and laypersons across several countries. Results from these studies as well as earlier investigations with our own samples (Smith et al, 2014;Sörman et al, 2014) provide strong evidence for the content validity of the CAPP as a model of psychopathy in that most of the 33 individual items and all of the six broadband scales have been rated as moderately or highly prototypical of psychopathy, with the Dominance and Self domains uniformly being rated as the most prototypical components across each of these prior studies.…”

Explicating the Construct of Psychopathy: Development and Validation of a Conceptual Model, the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP)

“…At the time of writing, translations into 12 languages are complete (e.g., Norwegian, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Russian, Lithuanian, Persian, Hungarian, Thai, Afrikaans, Sesotho) and translations into a further eight languages are underway (e.g., Japanese, Finnish, Te Reo). Research is ongoing with these versions (e.g., Hoff et al, 2012;Pedersen et al, 2010;Stoll et al, 2011). The overarching conclusion of the translators is that, while the process of translation is challenging, it is nonetheless possible to find similar networks of trait descriptive adjectives representing this disorder within these languages.…”

Construct Validity of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP) Concept Map: Getting Closer to the Core of Psychopathy

“…In these studies, a variety of individuals (experts, mental health practitioners, nurses, lay people) from multiple countries (and thus, languages) have been asked to rate the degree to which each of the 33 CAPP symptoms are prototypical of psychopathy, compared with a set of 9 "foil" symptoms that are conceptually irrelevant (in their worded directions) to the disorder (Fl orez et al, in press;Hoff, Rypdal, Mykletun, & Cooke, 2012;Kreis & Cooke, 2011;Kreis et al, 2012;S€ orman et al, 2014). These studies have yielded two highly consistent results.…”

“…First, CAPP symptoms are rated as more prototypical of psychopathy than are foil items. Second, symptoms in the Attachment, Dominance, and Self domains are typically rated as more prototypical of psychopathy than are symptoms in the other domains (Florez et al, in press;Hoff et al, 2012;Kreis & Cooke, 2011;Kreis et al, 2012;Sorman et al, 2014). Such findings are consistent with other research indicating that from the perspective of the Five Factor Model of Personality (low) agreeableness (i.e., antagonism) represents a core feature of psychopathy (e.g., Lynam & Miller, in press).…”