Donald R. Lynam, Ph.D. is Distinguished Professor of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University. He earned his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1995. He is internationally recognized for his work on impulsigenic traits, psychopathy in both youth and adults, and his research on using general models of personality to conceptualize complex personality constructs (e.g., psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, etc.). He is the author of more than 290 publications, including the edited volumes entitled The Handbook of Child and Adolescent Psychopathy, Using Basic Personality Research to Inform Personality Pathology, and The Handbook of Antagonism. Lynam currently serves as Associate Editor at Journal of Personality, and previously served as Associate Editor for Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Psychological Science. He was awarded the 2002 American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contribution to Psychology.
Below, Dr. Lynam discusses:
- the value of general models of personality in understanding disorders like psychopathy
- what we have learned from using the Elemental Psychopathy Assessment
- the future of psychopathy in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association
You can find a listing of Dr. Lynam’s work at: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=CHSuHf0AAAAJ&hl=en
1. How did you get involved in psychopathy research?
For me, it was confluence of interests and experiences. My early research training under Terrie Moffitt involved the goal of identifying early neuropsychological risks for later antisocial behavior. Then I added an interest in personality (i.e., characteristic ways of thinking, feeling, and acting) based on my work with Avshalom Caspi. Finally, I learned about psychopathy from talks and classes with Joe Newman. All of that training and those different approaches led to my initial work on juvenile psychopathy and laid the foundation for my later work on using basic personality to understand psychopathy. My later collaboration with Tom Widiger honed my interest in the Five Factor Model of personality.
2. Can you explain how the Elemental Psychopathy Assessment (EPA) is different from other self-report psychopathy measures (e.g., the Self-Report Psychopathy?)
I think it differs primarily in its derivation and how it conceptualizes psychopathy. The EPA was built using a basic model of personality and not a clinical description of the disorder. I work with the Five Factor Model of personality which posits that personality can be adequately described using five broad dimensions—Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. More specifically, you can think about each broad dimension as having six different aspects or facets, and so I work with a 30 facet model that uses 6 facets for each of the five broad dimensions. This model is extremely well-validated and very widely used. We began with a consensus Five Factor Model description of psychopathy; this description included all facets of Agreeableness (low in all the aspects of Agreeableness), most facets of Conscientiousness (low in most aspects of Conscientiousness), and a mixture of high and low facets from Extraversion and Neuroticism. We wrote new items to assess the more extreme ends of those traits. Importantly, the EPA does not assess any specific antisocial behaviors; we believe that those antisocial behaviors are consequences of the traits. The EPA is a pure measure focusing on psychopathic personality features and not antisocial behaviors. I think it is a bit more nuanced than most other measures. You can talk about elevations on specific personality traits or factors. You can ask which traits are associated with which psychopathic behaviors. You can ask which traits are at the core of psychopathy and which are more peripheral. Most importantly, it allows us to relate psychopathy to basic research on personality which can be used to inform theory and research on conceptualization, assessment, etiology, and intervention.
3. What is the association between psychopathy and the Five Factor Model of Personality?
For me, psychopathy is just a set of extreme scores on a collection of traits found within the Five Factor Model of personality—a model that can be used to describe any person. In prototypic form, psychopathy consists of low scores on all facets of Agreeableness (i.e., trust, straightforwardness, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tendermindedness), low scores on several facets of Conscientiousness (i.e., dutifulness, self-discipline, and deliberation), high and low scores on facets of Neuroticism (i.e., low anxiety, depression, self-consciousness, and vulnerability; high hostility and impulsiveness), and high and low scores on facets of Extraversion (i.e., low warmth; high assertiveness and excitement seeking). The more of these traits a person possesses, the more psychopathic they are. When all of these traits are present in an individual, you have a person who lacks all internal controls and is capable of anything. Such a person is not held in check by feelings of empathy, altruism, modesty, dutifulness, anxiety, shame, the expectations of others, or the ability to worry about future consequences. If I gave you the 30 facets of the Five Factor Model and asked you to build the most antisocial person you could imagine, you would build the psychopath.
4. How do you think psychopathy should be represented in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical manual (DSM)?
I am a pretty big fan of the Alternative Model of Personality Disorders (AMPD) which currently appears in Section III (“Emerging Measures and Models”) of the DSM 5. I am a big fan, in part, because this model is very similar to the way that I have been thinking about personality disorders, including psychopathy, for the last 20 years. In this model, personality disorders are diagnosed on the basis 1) of impairment in self and interpersonal functioning and 2) the presence of 25 pathological personality trait “facets” organized into five broad trait “domains.” There is currently a way of “diagnosing” psychopathy in this section, but I would slightly alter it. Right now, psychopathy can be diagnosed when criteria for antisocial personality disorder are met and three other traits are also present: low anxiousness, low withdrawal, and high attention seeking. The traits required for antisocial personality disorder are: manipulativeness, callousness, deceitfulness, hostility, risk taking, impulsivity, and irresponsibility. Minimally, if it were up to me, I would simply change the name of antisocial personality disorder to psychopathy—those are the traits most central to psychopathy. The three traits currently required to turn antisocial personality disorder into psychopathy are unrelated to negative outcomes. They don’t increase the risk of antisocial behavior or aggression over the other traits. If they do anything, they make the individual healthier and lead to better, not worse, life outcomes. If I were king of the diagnostic world, I would make Antagonism (i.e., the low end of Agreeableness) /Meanness a necessary and nearly sufficient element of psychopathy. The data suggest that it is the core feature of all psychopathy measures.
5. What is one improvement in the field of psychopathy that you hope to see take place over the next five to ten years?
I would really like to see the field adopt Open Science practices. Psychology is in the midst of a replication crisis. Things we believe we knew don’t seem to be true — key findings are not replicating. While this concern has been raised most frequently in relation to social and cognitive psychology, this is simply because those fields have bothered to look. I guarantee that clinical psychology, including research on psychopathy, is in exactly the same boat as social psychology. All of the conditions that gave rise to the replication crisis in other areas are present in ours. We run small, underpowered studies (i.e., insufficient numbers of participants for us to have confidence in the results). Our journals prefer to publish significant findings, particularly new and novel ones (i.e., publication bias). Every researcher makes dozens of undisclosed decisions as they run their study and analyze their data. I am pretty sure most researchers write their introductions after they have seen their results. As a result, I am willing to bet that at least half of our published “findings” won’t replicate and aren’t true. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to know which half those are.
The only way of fixing the field is through Open Science practices which aim to make research more transparent. These practices begin with making the details of the study available before it is conducted (i.e., preregistration). These details include the study hypotheses, the number of subjects and a justification for that number, the study protocol (i.e., all manipulations and all measures), and the planned statistical analyses including how outliers are to be identified and handled. A really strong version of preregistration is the registered report in which a study is submitted to a journal, evaluated, and judged on the merits of its methods before the data are collected. If the registered report is accepted in principle, it will be published regardless of its findings. This is how we should be conducting science. The next part of Open Science is making the data and the code for the statistical analyses public. This allows other researchers to check our work. My colleague, Josh Miller, and I have been preregistering our studies, including those showing the unimportance of boldness, for years now. There are more and more psychopathy-friendly outlets accepting registered reports, including Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, Journal of Personality, European Journal of Personality, Clinical Psychological Science, and Assessment. Until psychopathy researchers begin doing these things, my advice is to take every published finding with a giant grain of salt. This is especially true of studies with small samples (i.e., fMRI studies) and studies that report interactions (i.e., condition by psychopathy interactions). Both types of studies are horribly underpowered (i.e., far too few participants) rendering them publishable only in the face of statistically significant findings. Caveat emptor (“buyer beware”)
