School of Criminology and International Center for Comparative Criminology, University of Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada; Philippe-Pinel Institute of Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
Department of Psychology, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA.
Psychiatry Res. 2018 Mar;261:565-573. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2018.01.015.
The taxonomic status of psychopathy is the topic of considerable research interest. The latent structure of psychopathy will latent structure will guide the determination of the best assessment approaches, maximize the reliability and validity, will help to establish optimal cutting scores that minimize decision errors and will also facilitate the selection of the best research designs to advance the study of the construct. In the present study, taxometric analyses were used for assessing taxonicity, and they were applied to Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) ratings of 1218 female offenders. Hare's four-factor solution to the PCL-R was used as the bases of the analyses. The results of the various analytical strategies obtained dimensional solutions and corroborated that for females, as well as for males, psychopathy as measured by the PCL-R, may best be conceptualized as distinct configurations of extreme scores on personality traits rather than as a distinct, nonarbitrary class. These results reaffirm the fact that cut-off scores of are arbitrary in nature.
精神变态的分类学地位是相当多研究关注的主题。精神变态的潜在结构将潜在结构将指导最佳评估方法的确定，最大限度地提高可靠性和有效性，有助于确定最佳的切割分数，最大限度地减少决策错误，并有利于选择最佳的研究设计，以推进对该结构的研究。在本研究中，使用了分类分析来评估分类学，并将其应用于 1218 名女性罪犯的修订版明尼苏达多相人格问卷（PCL-R）评分。 Hare 的 PCL-R 的四因素解决方案被用作分析的基础。各种分析策略的结果得出了维度解决方案，并证实了对于女性以及男性来说，PCL-R 测量的精神变态，最好被概念化为极端人格特质得分的不同配置，而不是作为一个独特的、任意的类别。这些结果再次证实了这样一个事实，即截止分数本质上是任意的。
