Psychopathy Research

Summary by Sandy Michels and the Research Committee   Research Highlights Results of a meta-analysis revealed overall significant positive relationships between creativity and Machiavellianism and narcissism, but no relationship was found between creativity and psychopathy. The dark personalities (psychopathy, Machiavellianism Narcissism) are more strongly related to self-reported creativity than to performance-based measures of creativity. It is likely that … Read more

Summary by Jamie Knowles and Dr. Nicola Gray Sest, N., & March, E. (2017). Constructing the cyber-troll: Psychopathy, sadism, and empathy. Personality and Individual Differences, 119, 69-72. Background and aims The internet is an increasingly popular vehicle for socialising and communicating, and this has given rise to new forms of online, antisocial behavior. One of … Read more

Summary prepared by Dr. Beth Visser What is the Cheater-Hawk explanation of psychopathy? Grounded in evolutionary theory, this research used a Sims video game to explore the Cheater-Hawk hypothesis of psychopathy (Visser et al., 2020). The Cheater-Hawk hypothesis (Book & Quinsey, 2004) proposes that psychopaths have evolved to be both deceitful (cheaters) and aggressive (hawks). … Read more

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