Psychopathy and Antisocial Personality Disorder

Abstract

Abstract Psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) have been of long-standing interest to clinicians and researchers due to their serious detrimental effects on both individuals and society as a whole. This chapter begins with an overview of historical writings that served as the foundation for modern conceptualizations of psychopathy and ASPD. Next, the chapter describes the main inventories for assessing psychopathy in use today and discusses how these various inventories differ from one another and how they relate to ASPD and other conditions in the official psychiatric nosology (the DSM-5). The chapter also summarizes findings regarding their neurobiological correlates. Following this, the authors describe an integrative conceptual-empirical framework—the triarchic model—for characterizing relations among different psychopathy measures and organizing what is known about their clinical and neurobiological correlates. The chapter then considers how the three constructs of the triarchic model—boldness, meanness, and disinhibition—are represented in the dimensional system for personality pathology within the DSM-5 and how they interface with the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP), a new dimensional framework for psychopathology as a whole. Finally, the authors discuss how the triarchic model can be used to guide developmental research on psychopathy and coordinate further research on the role of neurobiological systems and processes in psychopathy.