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Psychopathy in Adolescence

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The Development of Aggression and Violence in Adolescence

Abstract

The study of psychopathy in adolescence is controversial because adolescents are still developing in the key components of psychopathy, such as responsibility, temperance (i.e., lower impulsivity), and perspective taking. The label psychopathy carries with it a stigma of an untreatable disorder. For that reason, prevalence rates for psychopathy have been difficult to establish. However, those using the more accepted measures of psychopathy in adolescence, such as the PCL:YV, have demonstrated that psychopathy predicts moderately well to future violence for incarcerated adolescents, and to chronically violent developmental trajectories. Despite the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5 steering clear of psychopathy as a separate diagnostic label, and leaders in the field of youth psychopathy discouraging the application of the diagnostic label of psychopathy, there is no decline in research interest in the components of psychopathy in youth. There is, however, little progress in the development of successful prevention programs.

What has changed in the study of psychopathy in adolescence is the development of measures of a continuous rather than categorical character, and the development of measures addressing the key socioemotional components of psychopathy, such as “callous-unemotional” traits. Callous-unemotional traits have been found to be highly stable from childhood to adolescence, strongly predictive of chronic and severe aggression, and consistent with a large body of research in development psychology on moral emotions as related to increased aggressive behavior. To avoid the problem of classifying youth as psychopathic, one study has classified adults as psychopathic, and then looked for early predictors of psychopathy within a large longitudinal dataset. The development of continuous measures of psychopathic traits has made research on psychopathy in adolescence less onerous a responsibility.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA

    Robert F. Marcus

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Marcus, R.F. (2017). Psychopathy in Adolescence. In: The Development of Aggression and Violence in Adolescence. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54563-3_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54563-3_5

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