Construct Validity of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP) Concept Map: Getting Closer to the Core of Psychopathy

Abstract

Psychopathy is an important clinical and forensic psychopathology construct; however, its optimal conceptualization continues to be a source of significant controversy. The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP; Cooke, Hart, Logan, & Michie, 2012) considers 33 personality traits that integrate historical and contemporary conceptualizations of the disorder. The current study examined the internal structure of self-ratings the CAPP traits in a large international sample of community-dwelling participants (N = 719; 52% women). Results indicated that a bi-factor (one general factor, three residual bi-factors) model representing global psychopathy, as well as residual factors of boldness/emotional stability, emotional detachment, and disinhibition, best fit the data. Associations with nine additional self-rated items revealed a generally expected pattern of convergent and discriminant validity. Finally, a Spearman rank-order correlation between CAPP item loadings on the global psychopathy factor and prototypicality ratings by experts (Kreis, Cooke, Michie, Hoff, & Logan, 2012) was .76, reflecting substantial content validity as well as agreement about relative importance of psychopathy traits using widely different conceptual and empirical procedures.

Keywords:

• psychopathy
• personality
• Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality
• confirmatory factor analysis

Notes

¹ Specifics of how each of the competing models were specified using the 33 CAPP items are available from the first author.

² The chi square statistic is highly sensitive to sample size and thus a very strict test for measurement invariance. Although others have indicated possibly better tests (Cheung & Rensvold, 2002; Chen, 2007) using CFI and RMSEA change values, these do not apply to WLSMV estimation because the CFI and RMSEA statistics for each model compared are calculated based on chi square statistics on different scales (hence, the DIFFTEST).

³ For Self-centered, Self-aggrandizing, and Lacks concentration the meaningful gender differences only occurred when crossing the lower thresholds (1–3); difficulty levels were identical across genders at higher thresholds.