Structural coherence and temporal stability of psychopathic personality features during emerging adulthood.

Abstract

Psychopathy is a complex personality disorder characterized by affective, interpersonal, and behavioral dimensions. Although features of psychopathy have been extended downwardly to earlier developmental periods, there is a discerning lack of studies that have focused on critically important issues such as longitudinal invariance and stability/change in these features across time. The current study examines these issues using a large sample of male adolescent offenders (N = 1,170) assessed across 7 annual time points during the transition into emerging adulthood (ages ~ 17 to 24 years). Findings demonstrated that features of psychopathy remained longitudinally invariant across this developmental period, and showed temporally consistent and theoretically coherent associations with other measures of personality, psychopathology, and criminal behaviors. Results also demonstrated that mean levels of psychopathic personality features tended to decrease into emerging adulthood and showed relatively modest rank-order stability across assessments with 7-year lags. These findings suggest that reductions in maladaptive personality features seem to parallel the well-documented decreases in offending that occur during the early 20s.

Research Review: What do we know about psychopathic traits in children?

“…The 2‐year stability for this study was .77, the 4‐year stability was .66 (age 12), and the 9‐year stability was .50 (age 17). Additional research further supports the early stability of child psychopathy (e.g., Barry, Barry, Deming, & Lochman, ; Hawes, Mulvey, Schubert, & Pardini, ; Lynam et al., ; Salihović, Özdemir, & Kerr, ).…”

“…At the componential level, Hawes et al. () found that GM traits were related to low neuroticism and low agreeableness and higher levels of openness, conscientiousness, and extraversion. CU traits were associated with high neuroticism, low agreeableness, low conscientiousness, low extraversion, and low openness.…”

Testing for response shift in treatment evaluation of change in self‐reported psychopathology amongst secondary psychiatric care outpatients

“…In the original study of the SQ‐48 (Carlier, Schulte‐Van Maaren, et al, ), the factor structure was based on seven correlated psychopathology subscales with one layer, which is also used in this study (see Figure S1). Before computing longitudinal measurement invariance tests, we tested the model fit with the following fit indices (Hawes, Mulvey, Schubert, & Pardini, ): CFI (acceptable when CFI > 0.95; Hu & Bentler, ), Tucker‐Lewis Index (acceptable when TLI > 0.95; Hu & Bentler, ), and RMSEA (acceptable when RMSEA < 0.06; Hu & Bentler, ). Standardized mean difference (d) with 95% confidence interval (CI), adjusted for response shift, is reported (Oort, ; Del Re, ).…”

Psychopathic traits as predictors of future criminality, intimate partner aggression, and substance use in young adult men.

“…The YPI was designed to assess psychopathic traits in adolescence, and there is evidence that its 3-factor structure is invariant across adolescents from several ages (Pihet, Suter, Meylan, & Schmid, 2014). Importantly, several studies have supported the YPI’s factor structure (Neumann & Pardini, 2014), internal consistency and validity among young adults in their mid-20s (Campbell, Doucette, & French, 2009; Neumann & Pardini, 2014), while evidence suggests that a short version of the YPI is a suitable measure for longitudinal investigations focused on examining stability and changes in psychopathic traits during the transition into emerging adulthood (Colins & Andershed, in press ; Hawes, Mulvey, Schubert, & Pardini, 2014). Alphas for the YPI scores in the present study were: total score = 0.93; ID = 0.91; AD = 0.73; and BD = 0.82.…”