This article reports on research that investigated whether the psychopathic personality inventory could be used to identify subtypes of antisocial personality disorder.
Using the results from two studies, this article discusses research that investigated whether the psychopathic personality inventory could be used to identify subtypes of antisocial personality disorder. In the first study, discriminant function analysis was used to predict cluster membership for the subtypes identified by Poythress, Edens, et al. based solely on the eight subscales of the psychopathic personality inventory (PPI). The second study used PPI-based discriminant function analysis to replicate classification of a sample of inmates that had participated in a prior PPI study. The first study found that the overall classification can curacy of the eight subscales of the PPI on the clusters from the original study was poor; however the differences between each of the subtypes were theoretically consistent several criterion measures. The second study found that six of the eight subscales could be used to classify individuals into subgroups similar to the ones found in the original Poythress, Edens, et al. study. The study also found that primary/secondary subgroup comparisons detected group differences that were not evident in the original study. These findings suggest that the PPI could be used as a simple method for identifying subtypes of antisocial psychopathic offenders. Tables, figures, and references