Do emotion and information processing deficiencies found in Caucasian psychopaths generalize to African-American psychopaths?

Abstract

Research on psychopathy has yet to establish whether the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised [PCL-R; Hare, R. D. (1991). Manual for the revised psychology checklist. Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia] predicts the same etiologically relevant correlates in African-American offenders as it does in Caucasians. Toward this end, we examined affective and information-processing deficits which have been theorized to contribute to psychopaths’ behavior problems. We classified 94 African-American offenders as psychopathic or nonpsychopathic using the PCL-R and the Welsh Anxiety Scale [Welsh, G. S. (1956). In Welsh G. S. & Dalhstrom W. G. (Eds.), Basic readings in the MMPI in psychology and medicine (pp. 264–281). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press] and assessed their performance on a lexical decision task that had differentiated the performance of Caucasian psychopathic and nonpsychopathic groups. Consistent with past research, the results provided little support for the hypothesis that African-American psychopaths display the same performance deficits as Caucasian psychopaths.