A taxometric investigation of psychopathy in women.

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.