Psychopathy, addictions and female gender: Comparative study using the Psychopathy Checklist Revised and the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality.

Abstract

Traditionally, psychopathy research has focused on assessing men with the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R). Research on women with other assessment tools is scarce. The objective of this study is to evaluate psychopathy, using various tools, in a sample with both women and men. The study involved 204 inmates (mean age (DS) = 40.93 (11.8)), 28 women (13.7%), in the Pereiro de Aguiar penitentiary (Ourense). Sociodemographic, substance use, and criminal variables were collected, and all were evaluated with the following tools: PCL-R, Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP), and the International Personality Disorder Examination. In this sample, when assessed with the PCL-R, males obtained significantly higher scores on facet 4, which measures antisocial behaviour. Women obtained significantly higher scores on the Self domain in the CAPP, measuring narcissism. No symptom or item was able to clearly discriminate psychopathic women from psychopathic men in a Support Vector Machine model. The construct of psychopathy is similar for women and men in this representative penitentiary sample. Women showed higher scores for narcissism and men for antisociality. It is better to combine the PCL-R with another tool such as the CAPP to assess these psychopathological differences. No symptom or item has a score that can be recommended as a method for discriminating psychopathic women from psychopathic men.