Randall T Salekin

University of Alabama | UA · Department of Psychology

The Proposed Specifiers for Conduct Disorder (PSCD) is a promising novel scale that measures psychopathic traits and includes an additional conduct disorder factor that taps the antisocial dimension of psychopathy. The current study sought to broaden the application of PSCD by examining the factor structure, convergent and discriminant validity, an...

The Proposed Specifiers for Conduct Disorder (PSCD) is a tool designed to measure psychopathy through its grandiose-manipulative, callous-unemotional, daring-impulsive, and conduct disorder subscales. The present study aimed to assess the psychometric properties of the PSCD’s parent and child self-report versions with a sample of 149 justice-involv...

Recent work indicates clinically meaningful differences in domains of psychopathic personality – such as grandiose-manipulative (GM), callous-unemotional (CU), and daring-impulsive (DI) traits – and parenting factors. Yet, different domains of parenting and reports from multiple informants may vary in their associations to psychopathic traits. This...

Background The Proposed Specifiers for Conduct Disorder (PSCD) assesses psychopathy components of grandiose-manipulative (GM), callous-unemotional (CU), daring-impulsive (DI), and conduct disorder (CD). Research on PSCD is still in its infancy, and further research is necessary to examine its psychometric properties. Objective We investigated the...

The Proposed Specifiers for Conduct Disorder (PSCD; Salekin & Hare, 2016) is a new self-report and informant measure designed to assess psychopathic characteristic domains along with symptoms of conduct disorder in youth. Previous factor analytic studies on the PSCD have found that the items are accounted for by a four-factor model reflecting grand...

This chapter will examine treatment amenability decisions in juveniles. The juvenile courts have long focused on rehabilitation instead of the punitive approach of the criminal system. A significant aspect of that process has been the determination of whether a given person is likely to be responsive to intervention or if the needs of society would...

The Proposed Specifiers for Conduct Disorder (PSCD; Salekin in Pers Disord: Theory Res Treat 7:180–191, 2016) scale was designed to assess interrelated psychopathic trait domains in conjunction with symptoms of Conduct Disorder (CD) in children and adolescents (i.e., grandiose-manipulative, callous-unemotional, daring-impulsive). Variable-centered...

The current study examined the psychometric properties of the Proposed Specifiers for Conduct Disorder (PSCD) in a sample of school-attending adolescent Belgian youth (N = 599; M age = 16.51 years, SD = 1.27). Given the recent interest in the PSCD-Short Version (PSCD-SV), this study focused on the 13-item variant of the PSCD. Study findings showed...

If Cleckley1,2 and Robins3 were alive today, it is conceivable that they may argue about whether conduct disorder (CD) should be measured primarily with personality traits or behavioral characteristics. However, these strict demarcations may not be needed, or most helpful, for understanding youth with conduct problems. Recently, I proposed that CD...

Psychopathy is a complex clinical disorder that consists of interpersonal, affective, behavioral, and antisocial traits (Hare, 2003). The current chapter discusses adolescent psychopathy from a variety of frameworks. Chapter sections include the defining features of psychopathy and related disorders such as conduct disorder (CD) and oppositional de...

Callous-unemotional (CU) traits (i.e., tendencies to experience low levels of guilt and empathy) are associated with severe and persistent conduct problems in youth. However, some youth with elevated CU traits do not exhibit severe externalizing problems, and further research is needed to identify conditions under which CU traits are more versus le...

Child psychopathic traits appear to be associated with negative outcomes. Despite the study of youth psychopathy often relying on multiple reporters (e.g., child, caregivers, teachers), there is limited insight into how much information these various sources contribute and moreover, how this information is integrated. The present study sought to ad...

The Proposed Specifier for Conduct Disorder (PSCD) was developed to measure the broad psychopathy construct with grandiose-manipulative, callous-unemotional, daring-impulsive, and conduct disorder subscales. This study tested the psychometric properties of Persian parent-and-child self-report PSCD versions with 974 parents (86% mothers) and childre...

Psychopathic traits in community and referred youths are strongly associated with severe externalizing problems and low prosocial behavior. However, less is known about the mechanisms that may link youth psychopathy and these outcomes. Social dominance orientation (SDO), defined as the general individual orientation toward unequal and dominant/subo...

Youth who experience psychopathy display multiple impairments across interpersonal (grandiose-manipulative [GM]), affective (callous-unemotional [CU]), lifestyle (daring-impulsive [DI]), and potentially antisocial and behavioral features. Recently, it has been acknowledged that the inclusion of psychopathic features can offer valuable information i...

ARTICLE FREE TO ACCESS AT: https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2022.2158842. In this editorial statement, we briefly delineated a series of observations, guidelines, and directions for future research focused on the most common outcome of multi-informant assessments of youth mental health. Discrepancies commonly occur between estimates of youth mental...

Frick (2022) presented a narrative review of some literature and made several critical comments regarding the extension of the full psychopathy construct to research and classification of childhood disruptive behavior disorders (DBDs). His arguments cautioned against the use of the multicomponent concept of psychopathy for specification of DBDs for...

The Proposed Specifiers for Conduct Disorder (PSCD) scale was developed to advance the study of child and adolescent psychopathy, especially as it relates to conduct disorder. This study is the first to test the factor structure, measurement invariance, internal consistency, and validity of the Persian PSCD self-report version in a gender-mixed sam...

The Proposed Specifiers for Conduct Disorder scale (PSCD; Salekin & Hare, 2016) is a new scale for the assessment of psychopathic characteristic domains in children and adolescents. The four domains are Grandiose-manipulative (GM), Callous-unemotional (CU), Daring-impulsive (DI), and Conduct Disorder (CD). We examined the properties of the self-rep...

Dvoskin et al. (2022) offered a cautionary comment on an article published in the Journal of Personality Disorders (López-Romero et al., 2021). This comment was focused on the scientific and policy grounds of our study, and cautioned against the use of the “putative psychopathic personality” label for applied purposes. While we agree with most of t...

This is the first study to test the psychometric properties of the self-report version of the Proposed Specifiers for Conduct Disorder (PSCD) in detained youth. The PSCD is a measure of the broad psychopathy construct, with grandiose-manipulative, callous-unemotional, daring-impulsive, and conduct disorder (CD) components. Participants (227 males)...

A total of nine studies put the psychopathy construct to a stringent test by examining the predictive ability while controlling for common risk factors for negative outcomes. In this way, the special section studies shed light on the important issue as to whether psychopathy as a construct offers something above and beyond common risk factors. Eigh...

Psychopathy is a multicomponent construct that includes interpersonal, affective, lifestyle, and antisocial characteristics (Cleckley, The mask of sanity. Mosby, St. Louis, 1941; Hare, The Hare psychopathy checklist-revised manual. Multi-Health Systems. Tonawanda, New York, 1991). At the child level, there has been a focus on only one component of...

Various imaging techniques as well as parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system measurement methods have allowed for the increasingly sophisticated investigation of the psychophysiology that underlies the psychopathic personality and its dimensions including Conduct Disorder. With this special section, we were interested in whether the dimensi...

We examined the self-referential processing of incarcerated youth with psychopathic traits while we recorded their brain waves using EEG. EEG research has shown that frontal alpha asymmetry and activation of brain structures associated with the default mode network (DMN) may be related to self-referential processing. Specifically, there may be grea...

The present study aims to further examine the four-factor model of psychopathy in adolescence with a new alternate model for the assessment of psychopathic traits and conduct disorder (CD): The Proposed Specifiers for Conduct Disorder-Short version (PSCD-SV). Data were collected in a sample of 414 adolescents (49.2% females) aged 12–15 at the first...

The aim of this study was to test neural functioning of 40 adolescent offenders with varying degrees of psychopathic traits using EEG spectra analysis. Theta/beta ratio was examined in an 8-min resting state task during which participants had their eyes-open (4 min) and eyes-closed (4 min). It was hypothesized that if components of psychopathy may...

This study aimed to further validate the self-reported version of the Proposed Specifiers Conduct Disorder (PSCD) scale, testing the associations between the PSCD with a scale that measures emotional/behavioral difficulties and prosocial behaviors (Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire, SDQ). A total of 536 Italian students (47.76% male; 11–14 ye...

Despite considerable understanding on the psychopathy subtypes in detained populations, the variants of psychopathy in non-Western populations are less well understood. To address this gap, the present study conducted a series of latent profile analyses with the factors of the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory, childhood trauma, and trait anxiety...

The Proposed Specifiers for Conduct Disorder (PSCD) was developed as a measure to assess the multifaceted model of psychopathic traits in children/youth (i.e., grandiose–manipulative [GM], callous–unemotional [CU], and daring–impulsive [DI] traits) in addition to Conduct Disorder (CD) symptoms. This study aims to test the psychometric properties of...

Objective To assess the preliminary efficacy of the PSYCHOPATHY.COMP in reducing psychopathic traits among male detained youth. Method In this controlled trial, a treatment group (n = 24) and a control group (n = 22) answered the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory-Short at baseline and post-treatment. Treatment participants attended the PSYCHOPAT...

The idea that very young children can manifest a constellation of personality traits that looks like psychopathy has rarely been explored. To fill this void, data from 2,247 children, aged 3–6 years (M = 4.25; SD = 0.91), from the Estudio Longitudinal para una Infancia Saludable (ELISA) were utilized. Parents and teachers completed questionnaires a...

The concept of ‘successful’ psychopathy has intrigued the field, yet relatively little actual science exists to understand what makes those high in psychopathic traits more or less successful, or even what constitutes ‘success.’ In the current study, we examined the validity of the moderated expression hypothesis, including an elaborated version th...

Objective: To assess the efficacy of the PSYCHOPATHY.COMP program in reducing psychopathic traits among male detained youth. Method: In this controlled trial, a treatment group (n = 58) and a control group (n = 61) answered the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory-Short (YPIS) and the Proposed Specifiers for Conduct Disorder (PSCD) at baseline, p...

The present study examined the construct validity of the PPI-SF, testing both its factor structure and the convergent and discriminant validity. Using a community sample of 1257 community members (869 females, 378 males), we tested whether a three-factor or an eight-factor model best fit the data and tested the links between the resultant factor st...

DeMatteo et al. (2020b) published a Statement in this journal declaring that the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL–R) “cannot and should not [emphasis added]” (p. 134) be used in U.S. capital-sentencing cases to assess risk for serious institutional violence. Their stated concerns were the “imperfect interrater reliability” (p. 137), the “variabil...

A group of 13 authors (GA) shared a statement of concern (SoC) warning against the use of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991, 2003) to assess risk for serious institutional violence in U.S. capital sentencing cases (DeMatteo et al., 2020). Notably, the SoC was not confined to capital sentencing issues, but included institutio...

Prominent theory suggests that factor one psychopathic traits may develop from increased input from hormones in the hypothalamic pituitary gonadal axis (HPG; i.e., testosterone) and decreased input from the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis (HPA; i.e., cortisol). Although there are extensive findings connecting low cortisol to psychopathy, less s...

For years, researchers have tried to explain predictive features of psychopathic behavior and externalizing personality traits (Stupperich & Strack, 2016). Among this list is animal abuse. Although animal abuse is commonly linked with psychopathy, previous studies have provided mixed results regarding this relationship and its predictive features (...

This study aimed to test the predictive and incremental value of psychopathic trait dimensions in early childhood. To this end, a callous-unemotional (CU)-based approach was compared to the multidimensional psy-chopathic personality approach in predicting future and stable conduct problems (CP) and aggression, whilst controlling for well-establishe...

Emotional processing deficits are often considered central to psychopathy. There is evidence that those high in psychopathy pay less attention to emotional stimuli, and it is possible that these individuals experience diminished withdrawal motivation or heightened approach motivation in response to emotional stimuli. Studying emotional processing a...

Early-life exposure to childhood maltreatment, whether physically-, emotionally-, and/or sexually-based has been linked consistently to psychological distress throughout the lifespan, including the development of personality disorders (PDs). Individuals with PD diagnoses are at an increased risk for criminal behavior, and borderline and antisocial...

The Proposed Specifiers for Conduct Disorder (PSCD) Scale is a new measure to assess psychopathic traits and symptoms of CD in children and adolescents. The current study examined the psychometric properties of the self-report version of the PSCD in a sample of community adolescents in mainland China (N = 1,683; mean age = 13.60, SD = 1.14; 54.1% b...

The present study examined the factor structure of the Personality Assessment Inventory Antisocial Features scale (PAI-ANT) in a non-forensic sample of 1257 undergraduate students. One to four-factor models were tested using exploratory factor analysis (EFA), with a four-factor solution exhibiting the best fitting model (Bentler 1995). Next examine...

The study of psychopathic traits in children and youth vastly increased after Forth, Hart, and Hare published a first paper on the topic in 1990. This state-of-the-art review about psychopathic traits in children and youth focuses on the: (a) reflection on the construct, while approaching historical, conceptual, ethical and legal issues; (b) etiolo...

Link to the Full Text: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1a9BRheKdgOkU

The Proposed Specifiers for Conduct Disorder (PSCD) scale (Salekin & Hare, 2016) was developed as a measure of the broader construct of psychopathy in childhood and adolescence. In addition to conduct disorder (CD) symptoms, the PSCD addresses the interpersonal (grandiose-manipulative), affective (callous-unemotional), and lifestyle (daring-impulsi...

Studies related to psychopathy and EEG have increased over the past decade making it a good time to examine where the field is on this topic as well as to determine future directions. The current study reviewed 68 research reports that focused on psychopathy and various components of EEG. We examined early, mid, and late level ERP processing as wel...

Purpose: The current study aimed to explore the benefits of including a broader set of psychopathic traits (i.e. Grandiose-Manipulative; Callous-Unemotional, Impulsive-Irresponsible traits) to specify Conduct Disorder (CD). Methods: A Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) based on the three-factor model of the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory-Short was...

Although low prosocial behavior (LPB) items have been incorporated into youth measures of callousness, it remains unclear from current factor analytic findings whether callous traits and LPB are best operationalized as a common construct, or distinct dimensions. Using data from a population-representative birth cohort (N = 5,463), this study compar...

Psychopathy is often perceived as a constellation of personality traits, yet there is little consensus as to what constitutes the core features of psychopathy. We applied a network approach to investigate the psychopathy network, as operationalized by four self-report measures of psychopathy among a large sample of undergraduate students. Items ass...

The current study examined the factor structure and convergent and discriminant validity of the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy scale (LSRP) in Chinese male inmates (N = 437). The original 2-factor model, the revised 2-factor model, and the 3-factor model were tested through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Additionally, convergent and discrimi...

A guiding question for this special section, sparked by the increasing number of studies on callous –unemotional traits (CU traits) and the DSM-5 Limited Prosocial Emotion (LPE) specifier, is whether CU traits are enough to identify a clinically meaningful subgroup of youth with conduct problems or whether other psychopathic traits contribute. Seve...

The aim of this study was to compare callous-unemotional (CU) traits versus the multidimensional psychopathy construct in their ability to predict future and stable antisocial behavior. At baseline, a community sample of 996 Cypriot 12-year old adolescents (52% girls) completed measures that tap conduct problems (CP) and psychopathic traits, includ...

The aim of the present study was to investigate if interaction effects among Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory (YPI) Grandiose-Manipulative (GM), Callous-Unemotional (CU), and Impulsive-Irresponsible (II) may add significant information in predicting self-reports of juvenile delinquent behavior among adolescents. A sample of 558 Italian high scho...

The aim of this study was to compare two youth psychopathy models (i.e., callous-unemotional versus multidimensional model) in their ability to predict future and stable conduct problems (CP). At baseline, mothers and fathers of 321 boys and 369 girls (ages 7–12) completed measures that tap callous-unemotional and other psychopathic traits. Parent-...

This study examined relations among interpersonal, affective, and impulsive-irresponsible psychopathic traits, emotional capacities, and recidivism rates in 144 detained adolescents. Emotional skill was conceptualized using a range of constructs, including face and voice processing, emotional intelligence, and self-reported cognitive and affective...

This study investigates whether primary and secondary variants of psychopathy can be identified in an applied, forensic setting based on self-reports of psychopathy and anxiety. Data were available for two samples of detained boys (Sample A: N = 847, Sample B: N = 749). Using three psychopathy dimensions and anxiety as clustering variables, latent...

Prior studies have shown that the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory (YPI) holds promise as a self-report tool for assessing psychopathic traits in detained adolescents. However, these studies have been conducted in a research context where anonymity and confidentiality are provided. Few studies have examined the usefulness of the YPI in clinical...

Background: Research on the topic of child psychopathy has advanced over the past decade increasing what we know. Method: This qualitative review examines the research base for child psychopathy and emphasizes its three dimensions: grandiose-manipulative, callous-unemotional, and daring-impulsive. Literature is reviewed addressing the cognitive,...

This study investigated how well components of the psychopathy trait are measured among college students with the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (LSRP), the Personality Assessment Inventory-Antisocial Features Scale (PAI ANT), the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Short Form (PPI-SF), and the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale-II (SRP-II). Usin...

The current study examined the reliability and validity of the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory-Short Version (YPI-S) in two different samples of at-risk adolescents enrolled in a residential program ( n = 160) and at a detention facility ( n = 60) in the United States. YPI-S scores displayed adequate internal consistency and were moderately ass...

The RSTI-SR was recently designed to facilitate juvenile evaluations by tapping 3 pertinent juvenile psycho-legal variables including risk, developmental maturity, and treatment amenability. The present study examined the factor structure and construct validity of the RSTI-SR with 190 adolescent offenders (Mage = 15.6) who completed the RSTI-SR and...

The investigation of callous-unemotional (CU) traits has been central to contemporary research on child behavior problems, and served as the impetus for inclusion of a specifier for conduct disorder in the latest edition of the official psychiatric diagnostic system. Here, we report results from 2 studies that evaluated the construct validity of ca...

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Fifth edition (DSM-5) Personality and Personality Disorders workgroup developed the Personality Inventory for the DSM-5 (PID-5) for the assessment of the alternative trait model for DSM-5 Along with this measure, the American Psychiatric Association published an abbreviated version, the PID-...

Randy Salekin is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Disruptive Behavior Clinic at the University of Alabama. His research focuses on the phenotypic expression of child psychopathy, as well as its causes, correlates and interventions.

Psychopathy is often associated with heightened intelligence in the eyes of clinicians and laypersons despite mixed research support for this possibility. We adopted a fine-grained approach to studying the relations among psychopathy and multiple indices of intelligence, including both cognitively based intelligence (CBI) and emotional intelligence...

This study aimed to identify distinct subgroups of adults in a general population sample (N = 2,500; 52.6% females) based on their scores on three psychopathy dimensions. Using latent profile analysis, five groups were identified among males and females separately, including a psychopathic personality group. Multivariate analyses of variance showed...

Callous unemotional traits have been incorporated into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM-5) and are being considered for the International Classification of Diseases 11th Revision (ICD-11). Despite the centrality of callous-unemotional (CU) traits it is only 1 of 3 dimensions of child psychopathy. It is p...

The current study was the first to investigate the convergent validity of the Risk-Sophistication- Treatment Inventory-Abbreviated (RSTI-A; Salekin, 2012). Adolescent offenders (N = 63) were administered the RSTI-A and completed the RSTI-Self-Report (RSTI-SR; Iselin & Salekin, 2008) and measures related to violence, criminality, psychopathy, and ps...

Amenability to treatment is a critical concept for psychology and psychiatry. To date, however, there have been very few specific efforts to define the term, and few studies have determined what factors predict amenability to treatment or have determined if indicators of an individual's level of amenability to treatment can be altered with interven...

There is a growing interest in the study of psychopathic traits from an evolutionary framework; however, there is a lack of comprehensive reviews regarding this issue. To address this gap in the literature, the current paper examines the evolutionary roots of psychopathy by reviewing previous research on this topic. Specifically, the potentially ad...

This study used an item response theory (IRT) model and a large adolescent sample of justice involved youth (N = 1,007, 38% female) to examine the item functioning of the Psychopathy Checklist-Youth Version (PCL: YV). Items that were most discriminating (or most sensitive to changes) of the latent trait (thought to be psychopathy) among adolescents...

The personality model of adult psychopathy by Widiger and Lynam (1998) posits that psychopathy consists of a maladaptive constellation of personality traits, drawn from a general model of personality such as the Five Factor Model. Specifically, the underlying callous-unemotional (CU) component of psychopathy is represented mainly by low agreeablene...

The Levenson, Kiehl, and Fitzpatrick (1995) Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (LSRP) was introduced in the mid-1990s as a brief measure of psychopathy and has since gained considerable popularity. Despite its attractiveness as a brief psychopathy tool, the LSRP has received limited research regarding its factor structure and convergent and discriminant...

Delinquency and substance use (SU) are commonly comorbid during adolescence. In the present study we investigate this co-morbidity with 3 main objectives: 1. Evaluate reciprocal relationships between delinquency/SU across early adolescence. 2. Assess the impact of older male friends, low parental knowledge and friends' delinquency on subsequent dev...

The current investigation examined the associations between personality traits representing DSM-5 Section III Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), its psychopathy specifier, and contemporary models of psychopathic personality disorder. We used two samples consisting of university students (n = 463) and community-dwelling participants (n = 148) r...

This issue marks the beginning of my sixth year as Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment (JPBA). Due to excellent submissions, the journal has had impressive success in the past 5 years with the impact factor doubling in that time. Our team remains committed to soliciting and publishing the very best articles in or...

The current investigation sought to examine whether an adolescent-focused measure of psychopathic personality traits, the Antisocial Process Screening Device (APSD; Frick and Hare 2001), could be appropriately used with young adults. Using a sample of university students, we examined the construct validity of the APSD by evaluating the latent facto...

The identification of psychopathic traits in childhood and adolescence is a topic of growing interest for scientific research. The development of models to predict violent behavior, together with efficient preventive and therapeutic programs, is a major goal when assessing youths with psychopathic traits. This paper focuses on the construct of chil...

This chapter reviews concepts of forensic mental health assessment that are relevant to disposition and transfer of juvenile offenders. It first provides an overview of the legal context of juvenile disposition and waiver evaluations before turning to a discussion of key forensic mental health concepts, with particular emphasis on personality and t...

Psychopathy and depression have rarely been studied together despite relatively high rates of both in court-referred adolescent samples. To determine if youth high in psychopathy and depression experience more psychosocial difficulties, the current study examined psychopathy and depression in 103 adolescent offenders using two well-validated assess...