Psychopathy and the personality dimensions of psychoticism,extraversion and neuroticism

The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) was administered to 173 male prison inmates for whom reliable assessments of psychopathy were available. Psychopathy was significantly correlated with the Psychoticism (P) scale (r = 0.16) and the Lie scale (r = 0.14), but not with the Extraversion (E) or Neuroticism (N) scales. Zone (octant) analysis indicated that psychopathy was not associated with any particular combination of P, E and N scores. Additional analyses, based on the discriminant function procedure described in the EPQ manual, indicated that inmates with high assessments of psychopathy were significantly less psychiatrically abnormal, in the EPQ sense, than were those with low assessments of psychopathy. A series of comparisons was also made between the P scale and a 22-item psychopathy checklist. The P scale was significantly correlated with six of the items, and with factors 1 (r = 0.30) and 4 (r = 0.19) that emerged from a principal components analysis of the checklist. Factor 1 is related to an impulsive, unstable lifestyle with no long-term commitments and factor 4 to the early appearance of antisocial behavior. It is argued that the P scale reflects the criminal, antisocial aspects of psychopathy and that the results probably have no direct implications for the suggestion that psychopathy and psychoticism are related in some fundamental way. A canonical analysis indicated that some interesting relations may exist between the EPQ variables and the psychopathy factors.