Stephen David Hart

Simon Fraser University · Department of Psychology

A recent court case in Canada challenging the use of certain actuarial violence risk assessment instruments with Aboriginal offenders generated considerable debate concerning the extent to which these tools may be considered valid for use across diverse cultures. A brief discussion of the role of culture in violence risk assessment, especially inso...

The Structured Professional Judgement (SPJ) approach is an analytical method used to understand and mitigate the risk for interpersonal violence posed by individual people that is discretionary in essence but relies on evidence-based guidelines to systematize the exercise of discretion. The first SPJ guidelines were published in late 1994 and early...

Investigation into the structure of Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) has consistently shown it to be multidimensional. The implications of multidimensionality for the scale are nontrivial. In the first place, because the construct of psychopathy has traditionally been considered to be dimensional and unitary, results seeming to show tha...

Part 1: The Practice of Violence Risk AssessmentPart 2: Formulation of Violence RiskPart 3: An Illustrative Case FormulationConclusion References

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...

Reports on an attempt to conduct a theory-based evaluation of the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure using the test validation framework of Slaney and Maraun (2008).

Social media influencers may be a particularly vulnerable population when it comes to online stalking. This study is the first to investigate how prevalent stalking victimization is in this population and what patterns of stalking behavior they may experience. The authors recruited 201 Instagram influencers to complete an online survey of their exp...

In recent years, political events have reignited contentious debates about psychiatry and democratic governance. This discourse has largely centred around the ethics and morality of public commentary, particularly in relation to the American Psychiatric Association's Goldwater Rule. Yet, few studies have examined the practical implications of healt...

In our article, "How much does that cost? Examining the economic costs of crime in North America attributable to people with psychopathic personality disorder" (Gatner et al., 2023, pp. 391-400), we estimated that psychopathic personality disorder (PPD) was associated with substantial crime costs, using a top-down approach of national costs in the...

The field of psychology–law is extremely broad, encompassing a strikingly large range of topic areas in both applied psychology and experimental psychology. Despite the continued and rapid growth of the field, there is no current and comprehensive resource that provides coverage of the major topic areas in the psychology–law field. The Oxford Handb...

Given substantial national crime costs and that psychopathic personality disorder (PPD) is a robust predictor of recidivism, a research gap exists concerning the cost of crime attributable to adults with PPD. The current study employed a bottom-up cost of illness approach to estimate the association between PPD and crime costs among Canadian men in...

A recent article published in the Journal of Personality Disorders (López-Romero et al., 2021) described the identification of “putative psychopathic personality” in a school cohort of 3-6-year-old children from Spain. This comment offers cautionary considerations of the original article on scientific grounds and critical comments on policy grounds...

Cost of illness research has established that mental disorders lead to significant social burden and massive financial costs. A significant gap exists for the economic burden of many personality disorders, including psychopathic personality disorder (PPD). In the current study, we used a top-down prevalence-based cost of illness approach to estimat...

We examined the long-term risk for stalking recidivism and the predictive validity of ratings made using the Guidelines for Stalking Assessment and Management (SAM) in 100 stalking offenders from a forensic clinic. Overall, 45 offenders were convicted of, charged with, or the subject of police investigation for stalking-related offenses during a po...

The aim of this paper is to identify some of the urgent issues currently confronting criminal justice policy makers, researchers, and practitioners. To this end a diverse group of researchers and clinicians have collaborated to identify pressing concerns in the field and to make some suggestions about how to proceed in the future. The authors repre...

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...

Code for McCuish, E. C., Corrado, R., Lussier, P., & Hart, S. D. (2014). Psychopathic traits and offending trajectories from early adolescence to adulthood. Journal of Criminal Justice, 42(1), 66-76.

Reports an error in "Examining the incremental and interactive effects of boldness with meanness and disinhibition within the triarchic model of psychopathy" by Dylan T. Gatner, Kevin S. Douglas and Stephen D. Hart (Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, 2016[Jul], Vol 7[3], 259-268). In the original article, there were several err...

Mental health professionals are at heightened risk of stalking victimization, however minimal research has examined empirically supported risk factors for stalking and the efficacy of risk management strategies. Three hundred and six counselors were surveyed, and the present study focuses on the 7% ( n = 23) who had been stalked by clients. Results...

The bivariate, empirical association between psychopathic personality disorder (PPD) and violence has been well established. Yet, questions remain about how to explain why this association occurs. To address this conceptual gap, we presented a review of theories of violence related to PPD. Next a conceptual analysis of how psychopathic traits may i...

In this chapter, we review two related sets of structured professional judgment guidelines for assessing risk for sexual violence. The Sexual Violence Risk-20 actually exists in two editions, Version 1 (Boer, Hart, Kropp, & Webster, 1997) and Version 2 (Boer, Hart, Kropp, & Webster, 2017), hereinafter abbreviated SVR-20 V1 and V2, respectively. Alt...

Objective: We studied the point prevalence of suicidal and violent ideation, as well as their co-occurrence and associated characteristics in inpatients with mental health disorders. Methods: Data on suicidal and violent ideation, and sociodemographic and clinical information, were gathered from 1,737 patients when admitted to the acute psychiatric...

The Risk for Sexual Violence Protocol (RSVP) is a set of structured professional judgment guidelines for conducting management-oriented sexual violence risk assessments. We investigated the interrater reliability (IRR) and the concurrent validity of the RSVP in the Republic of Korea. A total of 32 experienced and specially trained correctional psyc...

In our "Statement of Concerned Experts on the Use of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised [PCL-R] in Capital Sentencing to Assess Risk for Institutional Violence," DeMatteo et al. (2020) summarized the relevant empirical research and concluded that the PCL-R cannot and should not be used to make predictions that an individual will engage in serio...

This chapter investigates the use of risk assessment instruments for sex offenders. Over the past 20 years, numerous risk assessment strategies and processes have been developed to assist clinicians in evaluating an individual’s risk to reoffend. Currently, actuarial and structured professional judgment are the competing and leading approaches in t...

Česká adaptace: „SVR 20 V2 Manual for Version 2 of the Sexual Violence Risk–20: Structured professional judgment guidelines for assessing and managing risk of sexual violence“ od autorů: Douglas P. Boer, Stephen D. Hart,P. Randall Kropp , Christopher D. Webster. Boer, D. P., Hart, S. D., Kropp, P. R., & Webster, C. D. (2017). Manual for Version 2...

In a sample of 480 university students, we examined associations between self-ratings of psychopathic traits, made using the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP; Cooke et al. 2012), the Psychopathic Personality Inventory: Short Form (PPI: SF; Lilienfeld and Hess 2001), and self-ratings of the structure of their core social ne...

Psychopathy as measured by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL–R; Hare, 1991, 2003) is related to a range of rule-breaking and antisocial behaviors. Given this association, psychopathy has received considerable attention from researchers and legal professionals over the past several decades. Concerns remain, however, about using PCL-R score...

Resumen: Aunque se ha explorado el perfil neuropsicológico de los maltratadores, no existe suficiente información sobre su funcionamiento ejecutivo considerando la gravedad del consumo de sustancias. Un conocimiento amplio y sólido del desempeño ejecutivo de esta población ayudaría a esclarecer su aportación específica a la diferenciación de cierto...

Objectives This study empirically evaluated risk judgments made using the Risk for Sexual Violence Protocol (RSVP; Hart et al., 2003), a widely used set of structured professional guidelines for assessing and managing sexual violence risk and compared it to two popular actuarial tools for assessing the same. Method Based on file review, research as...

Introduction: Past research has found differences in the brain activation of batterers vs. other offenders in response to depictions of violence, but it is not known whether these functional differences are associated with structural brain abnormalities (SBAs). Objective: Investigate the prevalence and nature of SBAs in batterers using neuroimaging...

Though sexual violence in post-secondary institutions is prevalent, little research has been conducted on student perceptions of related policies and how previous victimization changes these perceptions. The current study collected baseline knowledge and perceptions of the sexual violence policy and victimization information from a Canadian undergr...

Accurate prediction of earthquakes, typhoons or viral epidemics is difficult or even impossible. Furthermore, in and of itself, accurate prediction is of little or no use in prevention or mitigation of harm stemming from such disasters. Yet it is still entirely possible to take effective steps to prevent or mitigate harm (e.g. development of buildi...

Mental health professionals tend to conceptualise violence as something that is perpetrated by individuals and caused by intra-individual risk factors. This is understandable, given that the primary focus of mental health assessment and treatment tends to be people who have engaged in serious, repeated, cross-situational violence and who suffer fro...

Objective: The Triarchic model of psychopathy (Patrick, Fowles, & Krueger, 2009) posits that psychopathic personality comprises three domains: Boldness, Meanness, and Disinhibition. The present study aimed to clarify conceptual overlap between contemporary definitions of psychopathy, with particular emphasis given to the relevance of Boldness (i.e...

Serious mental illness is a major risk factor for violence. Research suggests that many committed psychiatric inpatients have perpetrated violence before, during, and after hospitalization. Despite the prevalence and implications of violence among committed psychiatric patients, the responsibility of health care professionals to identify, assess an...

Since the 1990s, there has been a proliferation in sexual violence risk measures. § Sexual violence risk measures generally adhere to one of two models: § Actuarial-wherein the identification, measurement, and combination of risk factors, as well as the final risk judgment, is structured. Risk estimate provided as a percentage based on a formula. §...

The objective of this study was to examine reoffending rates and patterns in time-to-reoffending among a sample of offenders originally convicted of stalking- related offences. The sample consisted of 106 offenders referred to a Canadian forensic psychiatric clinic for pre-sentence assessment. All offenders were assessed using a number of risk asse...

Provides a farewell message from the outgoing editor of the Journal of Threat Assessment and Management ( JTAM ). The editor states that it is difficult to write this farewell and leave. He has dedicated the last 7 years helping establish and operate the journal. He states that he leaves with a sense of satisfaction, knowing the journal has already...

The objective of this study was to examine reoffending and patterns in time-to-reoffending among a sample of men originally convicted of stalking-related offences. The sample of consists of offenders convicted of stalking-related offences and referred to a Vancouver forensic psychiatric clinic for pre-trial or post-sentence assessment or treatment....

The present article illustrates the use of the Guidelines for Stalking Assessment and Management (SAM; Kropp, Hart, & Lyon, 2008) to assess violence risk and recommend management strategies in a case of stalking. Through this case analysis we will also highlight and try to better understand the phenomenon of stalking of mental health professionals...

Since the publication of Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) in 1991, the study of psychopathy has been a significant and rapidly expanding field. Similarly, our understanding of borderline personality disorder has undergone growth, especially in the creation of dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT). However, the majority of the research co...

We evaluated the content overlap of the tools by using them to assess a series of 5 well-known cases of terrorism, and by having researchers make similarity ratings of their risk factors. The findings indicated that: (1) The HCR-20 V3 provides a comprehensive framework for evaluation of individual-level risk factors for violence (i.e., those reflec...

SPJ guidelines for assessing and managing risk of sexual violence

The Spousal Assault Risk Assessment (SARA) was initially developed in the mid-1990s as the first Structured Professional Judgment (SPJ) tool to guide professionals in their assessment of intimate partner violence. After over 20 years since its initial release, the Spousal Assault Risk Assessment (SARA) has been updated to reflect current research a...

Recently, researchers in the field of forensic mental health have attempted to address the technical, empirical question of whether important clinical problems, such as psychopathy or malingering, constitute taxa (i.e., discrete conditions). In this paper, we provide a detailed elucidation of the foundational logic of the quantitative methods emplo...

An actual case of intimate partner violence will be presented using the SARA-V3 to demonstrate the risk assessment procedures used to rate risk items, formulate the violence, plan relevant and likely scenarios, and determine management strategies for the perpetrator. Finally, the conclusory opinions on risk for the case will be presented. This case...

As the series of articles comprising this Special Issue were being prepared for publication, there was a second appeal of the Federal Court’s decision in the Merits Hearing of Ewert v. Canada (2015). Unlike the first appeal, the second was successful. In this postscript, I briefly summarize the most recent decision of the Federal Court of Appeal in...

The triarchic model of psychopathy (Patrick, Fowles, & Krueger, 2009) comprises 3 phenotypic domains: Meanness, Disinhibition, and Boldness. Ongoing controversy surrounds the relevance of Boldness in the conceptualization and assessment of psychopathy. In the current study, undergraduate students (N = 439) completed the Triarchic Psychopathy Measur...

Psychopathy is a puzzle. It is a problem we have identified but don’t know how to solve. We don’t know exactly what it is. We don’t know exactly what causes it. We don’t know exactly what to do about it. This sounds rather hopeless, although the same things hold true for the vast majority of mental disorders. We are still in the early stages of res...

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...

Research findings on gender differences in prevalence and clinician gender bias in the diagnosis of Psychopathic Personality Disorder (PPD) and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) have led some to suggest that PPD and BPD are not distinct disorders, but rather differently gendered expressions of the same disorder. This paper explores gender diffe...

This review analyzes neuropsychology, psychophysiology, and neuroimaging studies that examine the neuropsychological functioning and the nervous system (central and peripheral) of male batterers. Previous research has attempted to establish a neuropsychological profile for batterers. Yet factors such as brain injury, drug abuse antecedents, and oth...

This article introduces the special section on the 25th Annual Threat Management Conference of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP). The theme of the conference, “Celebrating Pioneers in Threat Assessment,” provided an opportunity to review and acknowledge the contributions made by leading figures in the field, pay tribute to t...

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...

The utility of the psychopathy construct in predicting recidivism has been recently called into question. In particular, Walters (2012) results suggest that the three facets failed to add significantly to predictions of general and violent recidivism above and beyond the variance accounted for by age and criminal history The current study sought to...

Remorse has long been important to the juvenile justice system. However, the nature of this construct has not yet been clearly articulated, and little research has examined its relationships with other theoretically and forensically relevant variables. The present study was intended to address these issues by examining relationships among remorse,...

In Dawson, McCuish, Hart, and Corrado (2012), a case study was performed on two adolescent males involved in intensely violent offenses. Hours of interviewing both youth, separately, indicated a callous and unemotional disposition, extreme desire to exert interpersonal dominance over others, and contemptuous attitudes towards individuals whom they...

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 utility of the psychopathy construct in predicting recidivism has been recently called into question (Walters, 2012). The current study sought to examine the association between PCL-R facet scores and violence in a representative sample of serious offenders (N = 384) using a true prospective design. The current findings suggest that Facet 4 has...

The increased use of violence risk assessment tools in professional practice has sparked the development of best-practice guidelines for communicating about violence risk. The present study examined 166 pre-sentence reports, authored by clinicians and probation officers, to determine the extent to which they are consistent with those guidelines. We...

This study explores whether risk judgments change when evaluators are provided with information relevant to variable risk factors. Mental health professionals (N = 177) were randomly assigned a case history of an individual found NCRMD and provided with differing types of information regarding the patient’s functioning (i.e. Past, Past/Recent, Past...

We present the case of a Canadian man who perpetrated serial intimate partner violence that included incidents of severe physical violence and stalking against female victims, followed by a case analysis and formulation using the second edition of the Brief Spousal Assault Form for the Evaluation of Risk (B-SAFER; Kropp, Hart, & Belfrage, 2010) and...

The HCR-20 Version 3 (HCR-20(V3)) was published in 2013, after several years of development and revision work. It replaces Version 2, published in 1997, on which there have been more than 200 disseminations based on more than 33,000 cases across 25 countries. This article explains (1) why a revision was necessary, (2) the steps we took in the revis...

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...

The Journal of Threat Assessment and Management (JTAM) is devoted exclusively to the topic of violence risk. It focuses on operational or applied issues, that is, the development, implementation, and evaluation of policies, procedures, and programs for assessing and managing violence risk. It strives to promote the values of interdisciplinarity and...

Purpose Measures of adolescent psychopathy have yet to be examined in offending trajectory studies. This may explain why identifying etiological differences between individuals following high-rate and moderate-rate offending trajectories has remained elusive. The current study used the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV) to examine psycho...

The management of intimate partner violence (IPV) typically falls to police. For assistance, officers are increasingly using violence risk assessment tools like the Brief Spousal Assault Form for the Evaluation of Risk (B-SAFER). This study replicates the methodology of Belfrageet al.but examines the B-SAFER as used by Swedish police officers when...

Research on intimate partner violence (IPV) has led to the development of more than a dozen specialized risk assessment instruments. The present study evaluates the Danger Assessment (DA; Campbell, 1986; Campbell et al., 2003), which was designed to assess risk for lethal IPV based on victim information. We completed DA ratings for 100 male offende...

In recent decades the practice of violence risk assessment and use of violence risk assessment instruments has become widespread in the criminal justice system. How are courts reacting to these developments? Herein the findings of a survey of Canadian case law are reported. Using Quick Law 35 cases were systematically identified in which judges com...

This study describes the development of the WAVR-21, a structured professional judgment guide for the assessment of workplace targeted violence, and presents initial interrater reliability results. The 21-item instrument codes both static and dynamic risk factors and change, if any, over time. Five critical items or red flag indicators assess viole...

There is general consensus that dynamic factors ought to be considered in the assessment of violence risk, but little direct evidence exists to demonstrate that within-individual fluctuations in putative dynamic factors are associated with changes in risk. We examined these issues in a sample of 30 male forensic psychiatric inpatients using a pseud...

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 HCR-20 is widely used to assess risk of violence among patients with schizophrenia. Further understanding of the accuracy and changes over time in C and R scores is needed. Using prospectively collected data on 248 men with schizophrenia, the present study found that the HCR-20 significantly predicted aggressive behavior over 24 months. The H,...

Few mental disorders are the source of as much fascination on one hand and confusion on the other hand as psychopathy, also known as psychopathic, antisocial or dissocial personality disorder. This review focuses first on conceptual issues, clarifying the nature of psychopathic personality disorder. It then focuses on operational issues, reviewing...

To explore critical issues in the conceptualization and assessment of adolescent psychopathy, we report on the use of the Youth Version of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL:YV; Forth, Kosson, & Hare, 2003) and the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality-Institutional Rating Scale (CAPP-IRS; Cooke, Hart, Logan, & Michie, 2004)...

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...

The Static-99 is the most commonly used risk assessment instrument for sexual violence in North America and its results can affect highly consequential decisions made in the criminal and civil justice systems. Despite its influence, few studies have systematically examined how the Static-99 is used by clinicians in practice. The current study compa...

How do police respond to and manage complaints of stalking? To answer this question, we conducted a 3-phase study. First, we reviewed the literature to identify risk management tactics used to combat stalking. Second, we asked a group of police officers to review those tactics for completeness and group them into categories reflecting more general...