Are there ethnic differences in levels of psychopathy a meta analysis

The correlates that, perhaps, are of greatest interest include antisocial behavior and violence. Results of studies on adult criminal offending in the community conducted outside North America and with non-Whites in North America are similar in that psychopathy is inversely related to age of onset of criminal behavior and that individuals scoring high on psychopathic traits commit more violent and nonviolent crime and are more versatile in their crime patterns.

Meta-analytic evidence indicates, however, that psychopathy is a weaker correlate of violent recidivism among more ethnically diverse samples of juvenile offenders relative to primarily White samples. Pertaining to institutional aggression, meta-analytic results indicate that the country under study matters: Although the predictive utility of psychopathy for broad categories of institutional misbehavior is good, its relation to violent infractions in the United States is substantially smaller than in non-U.

One explanation for this disparity is the potentially greater ethnic heterogeneity in U. Another class of external correlates of psychopathy comprises psychophysiological and behavioral variables that exhibit reliable patterns in North American samples. The few cross-cultural studies investigating such variables offer inconsistent findings. Additionally, studies of performance on laboratory tasks that assess cognitive and emotional processing in North America suggest that Whites and Blacks high on psychopathic traits may process information differently.

Studies conducted in North America and abroad on the association between psychopathy and major mental illness and personality disorders indicate similar patterns for comorbid psychiatric diagnoses and self-report personality traits. However, research investigating White and Black U. Whereas the association between psychopathy and self-reported negative affect is similar for Blacks and Whites, associations between impulsivity and psychoticism are less consistent. The observed discrepancies suggest that mechanisms underlying psychopathy may differ for Blacks and Whites and may be influenced by genetic and sociocultural factors that vary across ethnic groups.

In contemporary research, psychopathy most often is operationalized vis-a-vis the PCL family of measures. Traditional psychometric evaluations indicate adequate reliability for the PCL-R among non-White adults as well as for adolescents of various ethnicities assessed with the youth version of the measure. To demonstrate cross-cultural equivalence of the PCL-R, it is also necessary to demonstrate that the factor structure of the measure is the same across ethnic groups i.

There is clear evidence of a replicable factor structure s among White and Black adult men in U. Cross-cultural equivalence in the case of the PCL-R also requires that the association between test scores and the latent trait of psychopathy be invariant across ethnic groups metric invariance , which may be examined using item response theory IRT.

IRT confers several distinct advantages to investigations of cross-cultural disparities: Representative samples are not required, more detailed analysis of individual ratings can be provided, and a determination can be made regarding whether scores are measured on the same scale with different ethnic groups. Overview of attention for article published in Law and Human Behavior, January Altmetric Badge. Mentioned by twitter 12 tweeters wikipedia 2 Wikipedia pages.

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Hence, there are currently many correlational studies, but also experimental or laboratory studies that have addressed very different aspects of this construct in this type of population.

These aspects are its structure, etiology, psychological mechanisms and psychobiological correlations to its relationship with a wide variety of factors e. Also, its ability to predict diverse socially or clinically relevant behaviors e. The results of some of these investigations that have examined differences in psychopathy based on sex or culture are particularly relevant to the aims of this study. Research has consistently found that the prevalence of psychopathy is higher in male offenders and prisoners than in female offenders and prisoners see the review of Beryl et al.

It has also been found that psychopathy prevalence and psychopathy levels are higher in North American male and female prisoners than in European male and female prisoners see the reviews of Beryl et al. Despite all the data that support the validity and usefulness of the psychopathy construct, a source of controversy concerning it has to do with the possibility of considering it as a categorical or a dimensional construct. A categorical classification allows a clear differentiation between people who have psychopathy and people who don't, because there would be qualitative differences between them.

In contrast, if it is considered as a dimensional construct and therefore, a maladaptive variant of the normal personality, there would only be quantitative differences between such persons.

The latter possibility is supported by a growing scientific literature concerning at least four major lines of research and argumentation: 1 the relationship between psychopathy and the five-factor personality model, also known as the Big Five model, and which is currently considered the most validated and consensual model of personality traits e. Reviewing all these lines of research is beyond the scope of this work, but, in general, the data of all of them seem to support a dimensional view of psychopathy, which conceives it as a maladaptive variant of the normal personality.

As a result, in recent years, there is strong interest in studying the presence and influence of psychopathy in everyday life, from the working world to couple relationships Hare, b ; Dutton, ; Babiak and Hare, ; Fritzon et al. In this direction, it has been proposed that it would be possible to find higher levels of psychopathic traits in certain professions or occupations e. The reason behind this could be that it is precisely these traits the ones that could boost the tasks involved in those professions or occupations and even facilitate success in them Hare, b ; Dutton, ; Babiak and Hare, ; Fritzon et al.

On the other hand, the 10 professions with the lowest levels of psychopathic traits were social-health assistants, nurses, therapists, artisans, stylists, charity workers, teachers, creative artists, physicians, and accountants. In the same direction, Lilienfeld et al. What they found was that people in a managerial position at work had higher levels of psychopathic traits than those who did not occupy such positions, and that those who worked in jobs with occupational risk e.

Employers also showed higher levels of psychopathic traits compared to psychologists and other mental health professionals. In this theoretical and empirical context, the main objective of this work was to systematically review the scientific literature on the prevalence of psychopathy in the general population.

By doing so, we have obtained an estimate of its prevalence rate in that population because, to our knowledge, no studies have reviewed that scientific literature to date. In this sense, this work hypothesizes that this prevalence will be much lower than the one observed in the offender or prison population. Secondarily, the present work was intended to examine the influence of the following factors on the prevalence of psychopathy in the general population: the type of instrument used to evaluate and define psychopathy, people's sex, their profession-occupation, and their country of origin.

In this line, and based on the scientific literature presented above, this work hypothesizes that the prevalence rates will be lower using the PCL-R or any of its versions than with other instruments; they will be higher in males than in females; higher in samples of employees and managers of certain commercial or financial organizations or companies than in other types of samples obtained from the general population; and higher among people from North American countries than in people from European countries.

The present review was focused on the prevalence of psychopathy as defined by the authors of the reviewed studies, but it did not examine the prevalence of psychopathic personality traits. Therefore, and as it will be explained in more detail later, studies about the prevalence of psychopathic personality traits or psychopathic facets e. These are currently the most complete bibliographic databases in psychology, medicine, and psychology in Spanish, respectively.

The search was performed in PsycInfo and MEDLINE using the following words in any field of the databases: community or university or college or normal or non-criminal , combined with these three terms in the summary or document title fields: prevalence and psychopathy or psychopathic trait. The search in PSICODOC was performed by combining the following pairs of words in Spanish in any field of the database: prevalence and psychopathy or prevalence and psychopath or prevalence and psychopathic.

In particular, the following expression was used in the PSICODOC search: prevalence and psychopathy or prevalence and psychopath or prevalence and psychopathic. Previous searches identified publications. After discarding duplicates that appeared in two or more bibliographic databases and adding six different publications identified after consulting the literature cited in the consulted studies, publications were obtained.

Figure 1 presents a summary using the flowchart proposed by the PRISMA group for the publication of systematic reviews of the scientific literature Moher et al. It also shows the process followed for the search, screening, and selection of studies on the prevalence of psychopathy in the general adult population. Figure 1. Flowchart of the process of searching and selecting studies on the prevalence of psychopathy in the general adult population.

Based on the objectives of this work and the reading of the titles, basic bibliographic data, and abstracts, the publications initially found were screened to determine whether they met the following inclusion criteria: 1 it reports an empirical study that provides data on the prevalence of psychopathy; 2 it reports a study carried out with samples of adult participants from the general population, including community samples, organizations or companies, university students, private professions, etc.

Doctoral dissertations, master's theses, and technical reports were excluded because of the difficulties sometimes encountered to achieve their full text. Presentations at congresses were also excluded because of the limited information on the studies they usually present. Therefore, as shown in Figure 1 , publications reporting theoretical studies or literature reviews 34 publications were excluded.

Three publications that reviewed other works book reviews or submitted commentaries on other studies were also excluded. Publications reporting single-case studies one publication or reporting studies of samples of participants from the forensic population 34 publications , samples of patients with psychological or physical disorders 10 publications , samples of children or adolescents 13 publications , or animal samples one publication were also excluded.

Finally, 11 publications that were doctoral dissertations or master's theses were excluded. Following these exclusions, the sample of publications was reduced to Of the 40 publications resulting from the screening phase, their full text was obtained, and, based on their reading, these publications were re-evaluated for compliance with the inclusion criteria.

As reflected in Figure 1 , 23 publications were excluded at this stage because, although they reported empirical studies of samples of adult participants from the general population, they did not provide data on the prevalence of psychopathy in these samples. Some of these publications reported empirical studies on the prevalence of some psychopathic personality traits or psychopathic facets, but, since they did not define the presence of psychopathy based on those traits or facets, they were excluded from the review.

For example, Neumann et al. However, Neumann et al. For example, they did not establish if it is necessary to show high levels in all four SRP facets to identify psychopathy, or if it is necessary to show high levels in only three, two or one of the four facets.

It is also not indicated if it is necessary to show a high level in a particular facet—e. Therefore, Neumann et al. Finally, two more publications were excluded. One of these publications offered data on the prevalence of antisocial personality disorder, but not the prevalence of psychopathy. The second publication reported a study conducted with the same sample of adults from the general population who participated in a previously published study.

Given that it offered the same psychopathy prevalence data as that prior study, it was also excluded. Following the screening and eligibility process of the initially identified publications, this systematic review finally included 15 publications reporting 15 studies.

The main characteristics of these studies in terms of their participants and the definition of psychopathy used are summarized in Table 1. Table 1. Main characteristics of studies on the prevalence of psychopathy in the general adult population analyzed in this systematic review.

The meta-analytical calculations to estimate the joint prevalence of psychopathy and the heterogeneity and bias indices of the results were performed using MetaXLversion 5. To stabilize the variances, the double arcsine transformation of the prevalences was used to calculate the conjoint prevalence, and an inverse variance heterogeneity model was used, as this model uses robust error variances Barendregt et al.

A random-effects model was also used but, as its results were virtually the same, they are not presented in this article for the sake of brevity.

To facilitate the interpretation of the results, individual and joint prevalences are presented in the graphs as proportions after reversing the applied transformations. To assess the heterogeneity between the studies, Cochran's Q test and the I 2 statistic were calculated, and to evaluate the publication biases of the meta-analysis, we used the Doi chart and the Luis Furuya-Kanamori index LFK , which has been shown to be better than the plot funnel and Egger's linear regression test for skewness detection and, hence, publication biases Furuya-Kanamori et al.

The combined prevalences for different subgroups of studies created based on the following moderator variables were also calculated, following the above methods: type of instrument used to measure psychopathy PCL-R vs. United Kingdom-Australia vs.

The significance of the differences in the joint prevalences of the different subgroups was tested with individual meta-regression analyses for each of these moderator variables and through a multiple meta-regression analysis with all the moderator variables that were statistically significant in individual analyses. In the case of the two moderator variables with three categories sample type and country , two binary dummy variables were created for each of them for the meta-regression analyses.

A total of 16 unique samples of participants from 15 studies were used to estimate the prevalence of psychopathy in the general adult population because, in one of the studies listed in Table 1 Boduszek et al.

The 16 samples included a total of 11, people who were mostly university students, with seven samples The samples of participants came mainly from the USA, with five samples To study the influence of the country of origin on the prevalence of psychopathy, the samples were grouped into three categories: North America USA and Canada: In the remaining study it was done through an interview 6.

Figure 2 presents the prevalence rates of psychopathy found in the 16 samples of the general population analyzed in the present work, and also the joint prevalence rate. Figure 2. Forest plot of the prevalence in proportions of psychopathy in the general population. Moreover, both the Doi chart and the LFK index suggested that this heterogeneity did not seem to translate into a large asymmetry that could reflect a significant publication bias, because, for example, the LFK index obtained 0.

Figure 3. Indicators to evaluate the skewness of the results of the studies and detect the presence of publication biases: Doi chart and LFK index obtained in studies on the prevalence of psychopathy in the general population. As can be seen in Figure 4 , studies using instruments other than the PCL-R found much higher rates of psychopathy prevalence more than triple or quadruple, on average than studies that used the PCL-R or any of its versions, with the combined prevalence of 5.

Figure 4. Forest plot of the prevalence in proportions of psychopathy in the general population depending on the type of instrument used to measure psychopathy: PCL-R vs.

For its part, the combined prevalence of psychopathy in samples of organizations [ In fact, in the individual meta-regression analysis, the two binary dummy variables created were statistically significant: organizations vs.

Figure 5. Forest plot of the prevalence in proportions of psychopathy in the general population depending on the type of sample evaluated: organizations, community, or university students.

As only 5 of the 15 studies listed in Table 1 offered separate prevalence rates for male and female subsamples Hagnell et al. In particular, the combined prevalence of psychopathy was higher more than double in males [7. Figure 6. Forest plot of the prevalence in proportions of psychopathy in the general population based on gender.

The main objective of this study was to obtain an estimate of the prevalence of psychopathy in the general adult population and, in this sense, to our knowledge, it is the first systematic or meta-analytic review carried out on this topic. Following a thorough search in the scientific literature, 15 empirical studies were found that had calculated the frequency of psychopathy in samples from the general adult population, including community, organization, and university student samples.

These studies used properly described tools and procedures to assess and define psychopathy. After calculating the conjoint mean of their results with meta-analytic procedures, based on a total sample of 11, people, it can be estimated that the prevalence of psychopathy in the general adult population is 4.

As could be expected, this prevalence is much lower than that found in samples obtained in forensic or prison contexts. For example, in the meta-analysis of Fox and DeLisi , it was found that the average prevalence of psychopathy among homicide offenders could be estimated at In the second edition of the PCL-R manual Hare, a , the prevalence of psychopathy, based on a cut-off score of 30, was In fact, the results obtained in terms of the I 2 and Q statistics confirmed that the heterogeneity of the studies was statistically significant.

These variations depend on many factors, such as the role of the type of instrument used to define psychopathy, the participants' sex, the type of sample of the general population, and the participants' country of origin. These factors have been analyzed in this work. In this sense, the results of the present work indicate that the first three factors, but not the country of origin, seem to have a significant impact on the prevalence of psychopathy. Depending on the chosen instrument, the participants' sex or the type of sample selected, prevalence figures can double, triple, or quadruple the figures found with a different instrument or with participants of another sex or from a different subpopulation of the general population.

Moreover, the results obtained in terms of the Doi chart and the LFK index indicate that this heterogeneity does not appear to reflect a significant publication bias, but could largely be attributed to these three moderator variables. In particular, the results of this work indicate that, when using the PCL-R or any of its versions , an instrument that is currently considered as the gold standard for the evaluation and definition of psychopathy, it can be estimated that the prevalence of psychopathy in the general adult population is only 1.

However, if other instruments are used, such as self-reports of psychopathic personality traits like the LSRP Levenson et al. In fact, as virtually all the studies with offenders use the PCL-R or one of its versions, the comparison between the prevalence rates of psychopathy obtained in the general population and in the offender or prison population should primarily focus on studies conducted with the PCL-R.

In this sense, the difference in the prevalence rate of psychopathy between the two types of population, general and criminal, is much greater: 1.

Differences in the prevalence rates as a function of the type of instrument and cut-off point established to identify psychopathy go back to the problems in defining the construct of psychopathy. Those differences also point out a limitation of the present study.