Using the Psychopathic Personality Inventory to identify subtypes of antisocial personality disorder

AbstractPurpose ess, Edens, et al. (2010) recently used cluster analysis to identify subtypes of antisocial and psychopathic offenders using a diverse collection of theoretically important clustering variables. Two predicted subtypes, primary and secondary psychopathy, were identified, in addition to non-psychopathic and (unexpectedly) “fearful” psychopathic offenders. The purpose of the present research was to determine whether these clusters could be replicated using a single self-report measure, the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI; Lilienfeld & Andrews, 1996). : Study 1 d discriminant function analysis (DFA) to predict cluster membership for the Poythress et al. subtypes based solely on the eight subscales of the PPI. s: Study 1 overall classification accuracy with the original clusters was poor, PPI-derived subtypes differed from each other in theoretically consistent ways on several criterion measures. : Study 2 d the PPI-based DFA to classify a separate sample of prison inmates from a prior PPI study (Edens et al., 2008). s: Study 2 dicted, inmates classified into the secondary psychopathy subgroup demonstrated the highest rates of aggressive misconduct whereas non-psychopathic were the least prone to engage in misconduct. sion I may serve as a relatively simple method of identifying theoretically meaningful subtypes of psychopathic offenders.