Psychopathy and violence: Does antisocial cognition mediate the relationship between the PCL: YV factor scores and violent offending?

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine whether proactive and reactive antisocial cognition mediate the effect of Factors 1 (core personality features) and 2 (behavioral deviance) of the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL: YV; Forth, Kosson, & Hare, 2003) on violent offending. In this study Bandura et al.'s (1996) Moral Disengagement (MD) scale and the Impulse Control (IC) scale of the Weinberger Adjustment Inventory (WAI; Weinberger & Schwartz, 1990) served as proxies for proactive and reactive antisocial cognition, respectively. It was hypothesized that proactive antisocial cognition (MD) would mediate the Factor 1-violence relationship and that both proactive antisocial cognition and reactive antisocial cognition (IC) would mediate the Factor 2-violence relationship. A 3-wave path analysis of data from 1,354 adjudicated delinquents produced results consistent with the first part of the hypothesis (i.e., proactive antisocial mediation of the Factor 1-violence relationship) but inconsistent with the second part of the hypothesis (i.e., only proactive antisocial cognition mediated the Factor 2-violence relationship). Whereas the direct path from Factor 1 to violent offending was no longer significant when MD and IC were taken into account, the direct path from Factor 2 to violent offender remained significant even after MD and IC were included as mediators. This suggests that whereas proactive antisocial cognition plays a major role in mediating the Factor 1-violence relationship, the Factor 2-violence relationship is mediated by proactive antisocial cognition and variables not included or not adequately covered in the current study.