The MCMI-II and Psychopathy

Abstract

We examined the concurrent validity of the MCMI-II with respect to the revised Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) criteria for psychopathy and the DSM-III-R criteria for antisocial personality disorder (APD). Subjects were 119 male inmates at a Canadian federal prison. Several MCMI-II scales were significantly correlated with measures of psychopathy and APD in a theoretically meaningful way. In particular, the MCMI-II was a good measure of APD traits. However, like other self-report inventories, it appeared to be biased in its measurement of the construct of psychopathy: Although it was a good measure of the social deviance component of psychopathy (as reflected in PCL-R Factor 2 scores), it failed to adequately assess key affective and interpersonal characteristics (as reflected in PCL-R Factor 1 scores). Using various cutoffs, the individual MCMI-II scales had rather low overall predictive efficiency with respect to categorical diagnoses of psychopathy and APD.