Psychopathy Research

Summary by Jamie Knowles and Dr. Nicola Gray Online trolling (the act of provoking others online using deception and harmful behavior) can have a long lasting negative impact on the victim. This study looked at whether factors such as psychopathy, sadism and empathy could predict involvement in online trolling behaviors. The authors asked 415 participants … Read more

Written by Taffy Chan, Sara Lapsley and the Research Committee What is psychopathy and how are psychopathic traits related to domestic abuse? The study by Humeny and colleagues (2020) examines the relationship between psychopathic traits and the experiences of abuse in romantic relationships. Psychopathy is a personality disorder, consisting of a collection of traits organized … Read more

Summary written by Dr. Josanne van Dongen In this study by Garofalo, Neumann, and Velotti (2020), the authors describe the potential role of emotion dysregulation in accounting for part of the well-established associations between psychopathy and aggression. Employing Hare’s (2003) conceptualization of psychopathy and Gratz and Roemer’s (2004) conceptualization of emotion dysregulation, the authors examined … Read more

Written by Alicia Spidel and the Research Committee This article by Lyons and colleagues looks at motivations for using Tinder and their associations with the Dark Tetrad of personality traits. Tinder is a location-based, real-time application that allows people to easily and spontaneously communicate and, if desired, meet up. On-line dating applications, like Tinder, are … Read more

Written by Nathalie Gauthier and the Research Committee Ted Bundy is estimated to have sexually assaulted and murdered up to 50 victims, and has also been referred to as an extreme example of a criminal psychopath. He referred to his female victims as objects like “potted plants” and spoke of them as being items to … Read more

A copy of a recent article by Jeffrey Hancock, Michael Woodworth, and Rachel Boochever, Psychopaths Online: The Linguistic Traces of Psychopathy in Email, Text Messaging and Facebook, is now available on the Members page of this website. Jamie Knowles and Dr. Nicola Gray prepared this summary of the article. ———————————— Study background and aims of … Read more