Interpersonal construct systems among psychopaths

Abstract

To examine social cognitive anomalies in psychopathic and nonpsychopathic participants, 56 inmates were administered a computerized adaptation of the role construct repertory test (Kelly, G. A. (1955). The psychology of personal constructs. New York: Norton) and given bipolar constructs (e.g. friendly–unfriendly) to evaluate interpersonal behavior corresponding to the octants of the interpersonal circumplex (Wiggins, J. S. (1979). A psychological taxonomy of trait descriptive terms: the interpersonal domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 395–412.). Partially consistent with the suggestion of hostile attributional bias, Caucasian psychopaths employed the aggressive/non-aggressive construct more frequently than nonpsychopaths; however, they did not demonstrate a consistent bias towards appraising others' behavior as aggressive. By contrast, among African-American participants, social cognitive abnormalities were either a joint function of psychopathy and negative affectivity or a function of negative affectivity alone. These results underscore prior suggestions that cognitive and behavioral concomitants of psychopathy may be differentially expressed as a function of race.