Both Self-Report and Interview-Based Measures of Psychopathy Predict Attention Abnormalities in Criminal Offenders

Historically, psychopathy has been viewed as a clinical syndrome with a unitary etiology, assessed via clinical interview. However, factor analytic studies suggest that psychopathy may also be understood as a combination of two subfactors consisting of (a) interpersonal-affective and (b) lifestyle-antisocial traits. Furthermore, evidence supports the use of self-report measures to assess psychopathy and these subfactors. This investigation employed a Stroop-like task to determine the relationship of the two psychopathy factors, as assessed by both interview-based and self-report measures, to attention-related abnormalities in psychopathy. For both instruments, the factors interacted to predict performance (i.e., interference), though the unique main effects were nonsignificant. The results suggest that the anomalous selective attention of psychopathic offenders is specific to individuals with high scores on both factors. Moreover, these results have important implications for the two-factor model of psychopathy and provide preliminary support for the functional similarity of self-report and interview-based measures of psychopathy.