The Hannibal Lecter Myth: Psychopathy and Verbal Intelligence in the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study
نویسندگان
چکیده
Due to the intriguing nature of the psychopathy construct, it is not surprising that psychopathic characters would appear in popular culture. At times, media portrayals of psychopathic personality are consistent with scholarly research, others times they are not. In the case of Hannibal Lecter, the psychopathic killer was framed as an individual with superior intelligence—an omnibus intelligence that enhanced his ability to manipulative and victimize others. Contrary to this popular conception and based on data from 840 cases selected from the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study, ordinary least squares and ordered logistic regression models showed inverse relationships between verbal intelligence and psychopathy for eight of twelve items of the disorder in this exploratory study. Due to the uniqueness of the MacArthur sample and concern about generalizeability, further research on verbal intelligence and psychopathy is recommended.
منابع مشابه
Psychopathy and community violence among civil psychiatric patients: results from the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study.
Although psychopathy is recognized as a relatively strong risk factor for violence among inmates and mentally disordered offenders, few studies have examined the extent to which its predictive power generalizes to civil psychiatric samples. Using data on 1,136 patients from the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment project, this study examined whether the 2 scales that underlie the Psychopathy Che...
متن کاملPsychopathic traits in a large community sample: links to violence, alcohol use, and intelligence.
Numerous studies conducted with offender or forensic psychiatric samples have revealed that individuals with psychopathic traits are at risk for violence and other externalizing psychopathology. These traits appear to be continuously distributed in these samples, leading investigators to speculate on the presence of such traits in the general population. Nonetheless, few studies of psychopathy ...
متن کاملRunning head: PSYCHOPATHY AND SELF-INJURY 1 Psychopathy and Self-injurious Thoughts and Behaviour: Application of Latent Class Analysis
Background: Although early conceptualisations posited an inverse relationship between psychopathy and self-injury, little research has tested this. Aims: To examine the selfinjurious thoughts and behaviour associated with psychopathy. Method: Data from the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Project were used to examine homogenous subtypes of participants based on their responses to six self-inj...
متن کاملRater differences in psychopathy measure scoring and predictive validity.
Although field studies reveal that some forensic evaluators tend to assign higher psychopathy measure scores to sexual offenders than others, the extent to which these findings apply to psychopathy measure scoring in other contexts is unclear. And no study has examined the impact of evaluator differences in scoring on predictive validity. We used data from the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment...
متن کاملNeuroprediction, Violence, and the Law: Setting the Stage.
In this paper, our goal is to (a) survey some of the legal contexts within which violence risk assessment already plays a prominent role, (b) explore whether developments in neuroscience could potentially be used to improve our ability to predict violence, and (c) discuss whether neuropredictive models of violence create any unique legal or moral problems above and beyond the well worn problems...
متن کامل