Abstract
The aim of this review was to examine whether there is a link between psychopathy and self-harm. A systematic search identified 14 papers which examine this link. A quality appraisal checklist was used to evaluate the quality of each study. The application of the quality appraisal checklist showed that the majority of the studies had good internal validity; however, there were some biases that affected the external validity of some studies. The results indicated that there may be a positive association between total psychopathy score and self-harm; however some studies with smaller sample sizes and low rates of self-harm failed to show this association. The results of most of the studies showed a positive association between Factor 2 of the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R; Hare, 2003) and self-harm. No link was found between Factor 1 and self-harm. The results did not show consistent evidence for a link between any of the four facets and self-harm. Although this review indicates a link between Factor 2 and self-harm, and a possible link between total psychopathy score and self-harm, the small number of studies in this area means that the research is not robust enough to provide strong evidence for these associations.
Highlights
A large amount of research has been conducted into the link between psychopathy and criminality (e.g. Dolan and Doyle, 2000; Harris et al, 1991; Hemphill et al, 1998) [1,2,3]
The current review found that few of the studies that examined the link between psychopathy and self-harm contained, or reported, high numbers of individuals meeting the criteria for psychopathy within their samples
In reviews with larger number of studies, those deemed of lower quality could be relied upon less; due to the small numbers of studies in this review, results from those of poorer quality had to be relied upon. This systematic literature search yielded 14 papers that examine the link between psychopathy and self-harm
Summary
A large amount of research has been conducted into the link between psychopathy and criminality (e.g. Dolan and Doyle, 2000; Harris et al, 1991; Hemphill et al, 1998) [1,2,3]. Some research is inconsistent with this idea, and has found a positive correlation between antisocial and lifestyle-related psychopathic traits and lifetime suicide attempts [6,7] and suiciderelated behaviour [8]. These studies have demonstrated a link between psychopathy and suicidal behaviour, the studies have either not studied the link between psychopathy and non-suicidal self-harm (e.g. Verona et al, 2001; Verona et al, 2005) [6,7] or not separated suicidal and non-suicidal self-harm within their methodology (e.g. Douglas et al, 2006) [8]. This review aims to examine the existing research literature to investigate whether Cleckley was correct in his assertion that psychopathy is associated with a lower risk of self-harm, and whether specific factors or facets of psychopathy are more associated with risk of self-harm than others [5]
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