Psychopathy and the Five-Factor Model of Personality: A Replication and Extension

Abstract

It has recently been argued that psychopathy can be understood and represented using common dimensions of personality taken from the Five-factor model (FFM). In this research, we examined this possibility by using the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992) to assess psychopathy in an undergraduate sample. Specifically, we matched individuals' NEO-PI-R profiles with an expert-generated psychopathy prototype to yield a psychopathy score. These scores were correlated with self-reports of drug use, delinquency, risky sex, aggression, and several laboratory tasks. FFM psychopathy was significantly related to all forms of deviance, although the effects tended to be small in size. Moreover, individuals who more closely resembled the prototypic FFM psychopath were more aggressive in a laboratory aggression task, less willing to delay gratification in a time discounting task, and demonstrated a preference for aggressive responses in a social information-processing paradigm.