David john Cooke

• PHD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Bergen

The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP) model is a new lexically based concept of psychopathy that has potential clinical utility. The main purpose of this research is to investigate the generalizability of the CAPP conceptual model in South Korea. In the current study, 88 experts and 1727 laypeople in South Korea were asked...

The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality Symptom Rating Scale (CAPP SRS) is a relatively new measure of psychopathic personality disorder (PPD) based on the CAPP concept map of psychopathy. To investigate the CAPP SRS, we identified the most plausible formal test structure for the test using the framework proposed by Slaney and Mara...

The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality-Self-Report (CAPP-SR) is a recent operationalization of the CAPP model, which conceptualizes psychopathy in terms of 33 symptoms that can be thematically organized according to six theoretical domains. The current study examined the higher order factor structure of the CAPP-SR symptom scales...

This chapter examines the utility of, and evidence for, extending psychopathy, both as a construct and as a risk assessment tool, to female populations. It discusses gender differences in relation to psychopathy and other personality disorders, risk exposure, and gender‐role socialization to understanding the expression of psychopathy among females...

In the field of psychopathy, there is an ongoing debate about the core traits that define the disorder, and that therefore must be present to some extent in all psychopaths. The main controversy of this debate concerns criminal behaviour, as some researchers consider it a defining trait, while others disagree. Using a representative sample of 204 S...

МЕЖДУНАРОДНАЯ КОНФЕРЕНЦИЯ, ПОСВЯЩЕННАЯ КОНЦЕПТУАЛИЗАЦИИ И СОЗДАНИЮ КЛАССИФИКАЦИОННО-ДИАГНОСТИЧЕСКОЙ СИСТЕМЫ ПСИХОЛОГИЧЕСКИХ ПРОБЛЕМ Современная практическая психология не имеет общеприня- той классификационной системы психологических проблем (таких, как DSM и МКБ в медицине), в результате чего диагностика про- блем клиентов становится полностью суб...

Previous research suggests that self-esteem and locus-of-control are inversely related to compliance. There is also research to suggest that low self-esteem and external locus-of-control are associated with interrogative suggestibility. While it is believed that compliance and interrogative suggestibility are risk factors for falsely confessing, pr...

The keystone of forensic practice is violence prevention. This chapter focuses on violence prevention and describes attempts to evaluate the environment of prisons and forensic psychiatric hospitals: in particular, attempts to identify the situational risk factors that serve to heighten the likelihood of violence. The focus is on how complex instit...

The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP ; Cooke et al., 2004) is a personality-based and lexical model of psychopathy. Its prototypical validity has been investigated among English, Norwegian and Spanish speakers (Kreis et al., 2012 ; Hoff et al., 2012). This study analyses the prototypical validity of the model from a survey...

The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP; Cooke, Hart, Logan, & Michie, 2012) is a concept map that entails 33 personality traits; it integrates historical and contemporary conceptualizations and operationalizations of psychopathy. The current project sought to develop and validate a self-report inventory to operationalize thi...

This manuscript details the development and validation of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality - Self-Report (CAPP-SR)

The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991, 2003) is widely used in clinical and forensic practice. Its latent factor structure has been subject to debate and controversy for almost 40 years. Various principal component and factor models have been proposed. It is argued that the use of independent cluster models has been questionable. The...

The diagnosis of psychopathic personality disorder has salience for forensic clinical practice. It influences decisions regarding risk, treatability and sentencing, indeed, in certain jurisdictions it serves as an aggravating factor that increases the likelihood of a capital sentence. The concatenation of symptom that is associated with modern conc...

La psychopathie comme concept est en évolution. La mise en place d'autres échelles offre une nouvelle perspective dans la compréhension de ce concept à la fois pour la recherche et la pratique clinique. Cette recherche explore les inter-corrélations entre la Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R ; Hare, 2003), la Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopa...

La Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP ; Cooke, et al., 2004) est un modèle hiérarchique et lexical de la psychopathie. Plusieurs recherches ont examiné la validité prototypique de la CAPP dans sa version anglaise, norvégienne et espagnole. Des études antérieures soutiennent la validité du contenu du modèle CAPP. De plus, les...

This is a book chapter in the forthcoming 2nd edition of The Handbook of Psychopathy on undertaking clinical interviews with people with psychopathic personality traits.

Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) validation studies have been conducted mainly in non representative samples of North American adult male serious offenders. Research in other samples is needed to test the generalizability of PCL-R construct validity. PCL-R psychometric properties and construct validity were evaluated in a representative sample...

The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP ; Cooke, Hart, Logan & Michie, 2004) is a personality-based and lexical model of psychopathy. Its prototypical validity has been investigated among English, Norwegian and Spanish speakers (Kreis, Cooke, Michie, Hoff & Logan, 2012 ; Hoff, Rypdal, Mykletun & Cooke, 2012). This study compa...

The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP) is a concept map of psychopathic personality disorder (PPD). The CAPP- Institutional Rating Scale (IRS) is a tool designed to assess CAPP symptoms in institutional settings. The CAPP contains 33 personality traits organized in six domains: attachment, behavioural, cognitive, dominance,...

Background: Numerous studies investigate the rate of neurodevelopmental disorders in forensic populations. Studies have also investigated the rate of psychopathy in such settings. However, there appears to be a paucity of studies looking at both of these (co-morbidity between these disorders) and the possible relationships between the two in forens...

The Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 2003) is a commonly used psychological test for assessing traits of psychopathic personality disorder. Despite the abundance of research using the PCL-R, the vast majority of research used samples of convenience rather than systematic methods to minimize sampling bias and maximize the generalizab...

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, 20127. Cooke, D. J., Hart, S. D., Logan, C., &Michie, C. (2012). Explicating the constr...

Purpose: This paper examines the construct of psychopathy and the challenge of conceptualizing and operationalizing a personality disorder that is poorly described by standard diagnostic systems yet remains important within the forensic field. Methods: We begin by reviewing what we know about the importance of psychopathy to crime and antisocial be...

This study examines the structure of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP) from a card sort perspective. The CAPP is a lexically based construct map of psychopathy comprising 33 symptoms organized by its developers into 6 broad functional domains of personality (i.e., Attachment, Behavioral, Cognitive; Dominance; Emotional...

The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP) is a newly developed, lexically based, conceptual model of psychopathy. The content validity of the Spanish language CAPP model was evaluated using prototypicality analysis. Prototypicality ratings were collected from 187 mental health experts and from samples of 143 health professiona...

This study is the first to our knowledge to examine the cross-language consistency across the original version of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathy (CAPP) and a translated version. The CAPP is a lexically based construct map of psychopathy comprising 33 symptoms from 6 broad domains of personality functioning. English-language CAPP protot...

Attribution theories suggest that when assessing an individual's actions, judgments are made about the cause of these behaviours and often these judgments focus on internal or external causal explanations. The current research investigated the effects of internal and external attribution on the scoring of the HCR-20 and the possibility of differenc...

The Risk Matrix 2000 is an actuarial risk assessment tool widely used in criminal-justice settings in the United Kingdom. It is used to provide expert opinions about the likely reoffending rates of offenders. Barnett, Wakeling, and Howard, (2010), recently published a large-scale study of the tool and argued that it demonstrated moderate accuracy o...

We investigated the precision of individual risk estimates made using actuarial risk assessment instruments (ARAIs) by discussing some major conceptual issues and then illustrating them by analyzing new data. We used a standard multivariate statistical procedure, logistic regression, to create a new ARAI based on data from a follow-up study of 90 a...

The measurement of violence is a major challenge in aggression research. Because of the heterogeneous nature of violent behavior, problems arise when applying blanket measures to inherently distinct subtypes of aggression. Incidents of intersibling violence (ISV) exacerbate these problems because siblinghood represents a unique offender–victim situ...

Psychopathic personality disorder (PPD) has important clinical and forensic implications. But much more effort has been devoted to assessing or diagnosing PPD than to explicating or defining it. In the first part of this paper, we describe the development of a conceptual model or “concept map” of PPD. Based on a systematic review of descriptions of...

Violence prevention is a key role for psychologists working in forensic settings. The last decade has witnessed dramatic improvements in approaches to risk management. Psychologists, by training and predilection focus on individual factors that serve to increase risk - personality pathology, relationship instability and addictions, for example. Thi...

The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP; Cooke, Hart, Logan, & Michie, 2004) is a new personality-based model and clinical assessment of psychopathy. This study was the first to examine the content validity of the English-language CAPP. Content validation is a crucial part of the development and refinement of any new instrume...

Cooke and colleagues recently developed the lexically based model of psychopathy named the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP, Cooke, Hart, Logan, & Michie, 2004). The current study was the first to evaluate aspects of the validity of a translated version of the CAPP model, which comprises 33 symptoms from six domains of per...

The construct of female psychopathy is poorly understood. Progress in this area is hindered by the reliance on male psychopathy conceptualizations and measurement frameworks, and the failure to establish what the construct looks like in females. Case studies are a fundamental step in the development of a clearer female psychopathy conceptualization...

The RSVP is a set of structured professional judgment guidelines for assessing risk of sexual violence. We investigated the interrater reliability (IRR) of judgments made using the RSVP in a multidisciplinary forensic-clinical context. Raters were 28 forensic mental health and intellectual disability professionals with diverse training and experien...

Psychopathy in women has been subject to little systematic investigation; no coherent conceptualization of the disorder in women exists. Previous research is constrained by the reliance both on a male conceptualization of psychopathy and on assessment instruments developed, and primarily validated, with men. This study utilized a newly developed, b...

Experienced legal academics and mental health professionals explore the current approaches to “dangerousness” and preventive detention. The defining characteristics of those deemed dangerous by society vary according to culture, place, and time, and the contributors to this text have gathered to analyze the policies and practices related to current...

Purpose. The present research investigated the relationship between underlying justice and vengeance motivations and sentencing recommendations made by expert clinicians, semi-experts, and lay-people. It was hypothesized that the semi-experts would recommend significantly different sentence lengths from those recommended by the expert and lay-perso...

The Prison Behaviour Rating Scales were developed to measure three forms of disturbed behaviour, namely, anti-authority, anxious-depressed and dull-confused. Prison officers rated 220 adult male prisoners on these dimensions and offences against prison discipline in the subsequent six months were recorded. The anti-authority scale showed utility as...

Objectives. The Scottish legal system differs from that which pertains in the rest of the United Kingdom, for example, there is no standard police caution to administer to suspects in Scotland. The absence of a standardized caution may result in suspects being presented with a caution which is both semantically and syntactically complex. Over the l...

Fifteen suicides occurred in Scottish prisons in 1994; this appeared to represent a dramatic increase over the rate in previous years. It is argued that rare random events tend to cluster and give the false impression of significant change. In order to determine whether the number of suicides in 1994 was unusually high the number of prison suicides...

Instrumental and reactive subtypes of aggression are likely to have different biopsychosocial roots. This has implications for research aimed at identifying aetiological mechanisms and for forensic practice. In this methodological note we describe the development of a unidimensional measure of lifetime persistent instrumental aggression based on in...

Purpose. The present research aimed to investigate the effects of attribution on expert clinical judgment in comparison to semi‐experts and laypeople. Two research questions were addressed. First, would experts be less subject to attributional manipulations, in terms of their perceived ratings of dangerousness, than would semi‐experts or laypeople?...

This paper introduces the Special Section on personality disorder and violence. The first paper evaluates the impact of removing the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) as a mandatory element of a major approach to the assessment of violence risk-the HCR-20. The second paper considers violence to self as well as violence to others; it examines the influe...

Few cross-cultural studies have assessed psychopathy and none have included a sample from non-western countries. This study investigated the factor structure of the Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (PCL:SV) in an Iranian sample, and compared the results with a western sample. Three hundred fifty-one Iranian prisoners were compared with 405...

PRISM: Promoting Risk Intervention by Situational Management (Johnstone & Cooke, 200835. Johnstone , L. and Cooke , D. J. 2008. PRISM: Promoting Risk Intervention by Situational Management, Northern Networking Events. www.violenceriskassessment.com View all references) provides a systematic process for evaluating a range of situational risk facto...

Knowledge of group tendencies may not assist accurate predictions in the individual case. This has importance for forensic decision making and for the assessment tools routinely applied in forensic evaluations. In this article, we applied Monte Carlo methods to examine diagnostic agreement with different levels of inter-rater agreement given the di...

PRISM (Promoting Risk Interventions by Situational Management) has multiple uses. In this paper we describe case studies that consider, first, the riot and the consequent loss of Glendairy prison in Barbados, and second, the functioning of the temporary prison at Harrison's point created to contain, on a short-term basis, over 1000 prisoners. We an...

Tackling violence in prisons and forensic institutions is a key role for mental health professionals. Major strides have been made in the last twenty years in the evaluation and management of individual risk factors. However, the understanding of situational—or institutional—risk factors is less well developed. This special section considers PRISM....

The development of the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; R. D. Hare, 2003) has fueled intense clinical interest in the construct of psychopathy. Unfortunately, a side effect of this interest has been conceptual confusion and, in particular, the conflating of measures with constructs. Indeed, the field is in danger of equating the PCL-R with the...

In our article by J. L. Skeem & D. J. Cooke, (2010), we outlined the dangers inherent in conflating the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; R. Hare, 1991) with psychopathy itself. In their response, R. Hare and C. Neumann (2010) seemed to agree with key points that the PCL-R should not be confused with psychopathy and that criminal behavior is no...

Knowledge of group tendencies may not assist accurate predictions in the individual case. This has importance for forensic decision making and for the assessment tools routinely applied in forensic evaluations. In this article, we applied Monte Carlo methods to examine diagnostic agreement with different levels of inter-rater agreement given the di...

The Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R) is the most widely used measure of psychopathy in forensic clinical practice, but the generalizability of the measure to offenders with intellectual disabilities (ID) has not been clearly established. This study examined the structural equivalence and scalar equivalence of the PCL-R in a sample of 185 male...

Within Scotland the procurator fiscal decides whether to prosecute individuals accused of committing crimes and offences. A new ‘diversion’ scheme has been developed whereby alleged offenders can be offered treatment in lieu of prosecution. The evolution and operation of the scheme based at the Douglas Inch Centre in Glasgow is described. The type...

Violence in British jails is increasing. Explanations of this rise are often couched in terms of the psychological characteristics of the perpetrators. This paper argues that the characteristics of the regime have a significant role in the etiology of violent incidents. The evidence relating to violent incidents in prisons, special hospitals and se...

Psychopathy is a personality disorder, that is, a chronic disturbance in an individual's relations with self, others and their environment which results in distress or failure to fulfil social roles and obligations [10]. Personality disorders affect how individuals think, feel and behave. Psychopathic personality disorder is a particular form of pe...

The study of Psychopathic Personality Disorder in adults has made a sustained and important contribution to our understanding and management of certain adult offenders. As a consequence there have been several attempts to translate the construct so that it applies to children and adolescents. This has been justified on several grounds including the...

Little information exists on treatment effectiveness in antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). We investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of carrying out a randomized controlled trial of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) in men with ASPD who were aggressive. This was an exploratory two-centre, randomized controlled trial in a community sett...

Violence among prisoners and that between prisoners and staff is a perennial concern for all prison systems. That violent prisoners are only violent in certain circumstances suggests a need to develop ways to understand not only the origins of violence in prison but also the situational contexts in which violence occurs. The technology of risk asse...

The perpetration of severe inter-sibling violence (SISV) remains a largely unexplored area of family violence. This article describes an investigation of risk factors for intentional SISV perpetration. A sample of 111 young people under the care of the Scottish criminal justice or welfare systems was studied. A SISV perpetration interview schedule...

Question I: Is there a Fit between the Underlying Theory of Psychopathy and Personality Features in Females?Question II: How Should Psychopathy in Females be Measured?Question III: How can Psychopathy Inform Forensic Assessments with Females?Concluding ThoughtsReferences

There is growing interest in the construct of psychopathy in both adolescent and childhood populations. This interest is underpinned by observations that psychopathy in adults is linked to chronic criminal behaviour, institutional disruptiveness, unresponsiveness to treatment and comorbidity with other disorders. Extending this construct to young p...

Psychopathy is the key construct in the Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD) Programme. The Psychopathy Checklist - Revised is used as a primary means of selection for the programme. The Checklist confounds two distinct constructs - personality disorder and criminal behaviour. This confound is important both practically and theoreticall...

Actuarial risk assessment instruments (ARAIs) estimate the probability that individuals will engage in future violence. To evaluate the ;margins of error' at the group and individual level for risk estimates made using ARAIs. An established statistical method was used to construct 95% CI for group and individual risk estimates made using two popula...

Common difficulties in measures of violent behavior are their multidimensional nature, the nonempirical ordering of violent acts, the inclusion of undiscriminating items, and differential precision of measurement across the range of seriousness. Data collected on a sample of 250 male Scottish prisoners, using the MacArthur Community Violence Screen...

The impact of violence on institutions is not hard to discern: staff and patients are physically injured and may become psychologically disturbed, property is destroyed, and regimes and programs are disrupted and thereby impoverished. Furthermore, violent individuals are not only incarcerated for longer but are held in more expensive and more restr...

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were performed on the interaction of two solid surfaces, namely the (00.1) hematite and (10.4) calcite surfaces, in contact with aqueous electrolyte solutions containing different concentrations of dissolved NaCl. The structure and a number of properties of the interface were investigated. The size and amount of...

Despite the growing number of studies on psychopathy in females, the core characteristics of this personality disorder among females remain uninvestigated. Most studies on psychopathy in females have attempted to understand the disorder by applying male criteria to adult females: they have ignored putative gender differences in the constitution and...

Previous research has reported that psychopathy ratings of offenders in Canada and the United States made using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised were metrically equivalent with each other, but not with ratings of Scottish offenders or with ratings of offenders from the rest of the UK. In this study, we further evaluated the cross-cultural validity...

The diagnosis of psychopathy is important for violence risk assessment. To investigate whether the syndromal structure of psychopathy, as measured by the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), is the same in the UK and North America, and whether this measure yields scores that are equivalent in these two regions. Confirmatory factor analytic and it...

Molecular dynamics simulations of three solid surfaces, namely, the (00.1) and (01.2) hematite surfaces and the (10.4) calcite surface, in contact with an aqueous solution have been performed and the structure of water near the interface investigated. We initially calculated the hydration and hydroxylation energies of the two hematite surfaces usin...

Cross-national differences in the prevalence of psychopathy have been reported. This study examined whether rater effects could account for these differences. Psychopathy was assessed with the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; R. D. Hare, 1991). Videotapes of 6 Scottish prisoners and 6 Canadian prisoners were rated by 10 Scottish and 10 Canadia...

A survey of clinical views suggests that the significance of antisocial and socially deviant behavior in the diagnosis of psychopathic personality disorder is unclear. To investigate this issue, we evaluated Psychopathy Checklist-Revised ratings (PCL-R; Hare, 1991) using structural equation modeling. One model, referred to as the measurement model,...

Can psychopathy be identified in pre-adolescent children? This question has both theoretical and practical implications. So far, attempts to answer this question have been made by making downward extensions of symptoms of the disorder as found in adults. We argue that for the construct of psychopathy to be viable as a construct in childhood it is n...

To examine whether individuals instructed to fake intellectual impairment on the WAIS-R employed common faking tactics and to assess the accuracy of detection of faking tactics employed. Two groups of participants were instructed to fake 'mental handicap' on the WAIS-R. The first group included incarcerated young offenders and the second group incl...

The Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL–R) is an important measure in both applied and research settings. Evidence for its validity is mostly derived from male Caucasian participants. PCL–R ratings of 359 Caucasian and 356 African American participants were compared using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and item response theory (IRT) analyses. Pr...

Psychopathy is characterized by diverse indicators. Clinical accounts have emphasized 3 distinct facets: interpersonal, affective, and behavioral. Research using the Psychopathy Checklist--Revised (PCL-R), however, has emphasized a 2-factor model. A review of the literature on the PCL-R and related measures of psychopathy, together with confirmator...

Psychopathy is characterized by diverse indicators. Clinical accounts have emphasized 3 distinct facets: interpersonal, affective, and behavioral, Research using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), however, has emphasized a 2-factor model, A review of the literature on the PCL-R and related measures of psychopathy, together with confirmatory...

Like all complex human behavior serial killing is underpinned by a skein of interrelated and interacting processes; biological, social and psychological processes (Raine, 1993; Skrapec, this volume). Within the domain of personality disorder the two forms of disorder which have been most frequently implicated are psychopathy and sadistic personalit...

The impact of violence on a prison is not hard to discern: Staff and prisoners are physically injured and may become psychologically disturbed, property is destroyed, regimes and programmes are disrupted and thereby impoverished, violent prisoners are not only incarcerated for longer but held in more expensive conditions (Cooke, 1992a; Goetting & H...

Differences in the prevalence and presentation of psychopathic personality disorder between North America and Scotland were evaluated. R. D. Hare's (1991) Psychopathy Checklist--Revised ratings obtained from a sample of 2,067 North American male prisoners and forensic patients were compared with ratings obtained from 246 Scottish male prisoners. It...

The Screening Version of the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL:SV; S. D. Hart, D. N. Cox, & R. D. Hare, 1995) was developed to complement the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R; R. D. Hare. 1991), and for use outside forensic settings. The PCL:SV takes less time to administer and requires less collateral information than the PCL-R. An item respo...

We compared the childhood experiences of criminal psychopaths with those of criminal nonpsychopaths, to examine whether differences in either the type or intensity of adverse experience in childhood could be identified. One hundred and five prisoners, 50 psychopaths, and 55 nonpsychopaths were assessed with the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R)...

Differences in the prevalence and presentation of psychopathic personality disorder between North America and Scotland were evaluated R D. Hare's (1991) Psychopathy Checklist-Revised ratings obtained from a sample of 2,067 North American male prisoners and forensic patients were compared with ratings obtained from 246 Scottish male prisoners. Item...

The first section of the chapter reviews research on psychopathy. The first section ends with an overview of some theories that may account for the increased risk of violence among psychopathic individuals. In the second section, the authors review research on sadistic personality disorder. The chapter is concluded by highlighting some important si...

The level of psychological disturbance among prisoners is increasing. Prisoners and prison managers can benefit from the systematic measurement of the rate and nature of disturbance in the prison population. This article describes the development of a rating procedure to measure disturbed behavior. Principal component analysis of ratings on 890 pri...