Prototypical Validity and Factor Structure of the French Version of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP) Model

Abstract

In a study undertaken to examine the content validity of the French-language version of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP), a lexically-based conceptual model and clinical assessment of psychopathy, 204 French-speaking mental health professionals rated the symptoms covered by the CAPP for prototypicality. The majority of the symptoms were deemed to be “moderately” to “highly” prototypical of psychopathy. Of the model’s six domains, Dominance, Attachment and Self were considered more prototypical than Emotional, Behavioral and Cognitive. Results were consistent with those of other prototypicality studies. Descriptives analyses suggested that the ratings of English-speaking mental health professionals were higher than their French-speaking counterparts. However, the effect sizes were small according to the Cohen’s d analyses. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that Attachment was the only unidimensional domain. Finally, exploratory factor analysis yielded three factors—Egotism, Interpersonal rigidity, and Lack of responsibility. These factors were primarily underpinned by symptoms that entailed interpersonal and social cognitive traits.

Keywords:

• Psychopathy
• CAPP
• prototypical analysis
• conceptual model
• interpersonal

Acknowledgement

This article was produced thanks to the support of the Ministry of the Walloon Region for Health and Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities for the Centre de Recherche en Défense Sociale. The authors thank Marie-Christine Stafford for her help with CFA. We also thank all the participants who took the time to complete the protocol.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figure 1. Comparison between English and French CAPP symptoms.

Figure 2. Scree plot of the exploratory factor analysis.

Notes

1 For more information on how the CAPP model was developed, see Cooke et al. (2012) and Cooke (2018).