Proposed Specifiers for Conduct Disorder (PSCD) scale: A Latent Profile Analysis with At-Risk Adolescents

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 studies have provided support for a four-factor PSCD structure (Salekin et al. in Psychol Assess 34(10):985–992, 2022) in line with other adolescent and adult studies. The current person-centered study used latent profile analysis of the PSCD domains to examine whether theoretically meaningful and empirically robust PSCD subtypes emerged from a diverse sample (70.9% White, 20.1% Black, 3.6% Hispanic, and 5.4% other) of adolescents (modal age = 17) in a military style residential facility (N = 409; Males = 80.6%). As hypothesized, a four-class solution was best, consistent with adult psychopathy subtyping research (Hare et al. in Handbook of Psychopathy 39–79, 2018; Roy et al. in Pers Disord: Theory Res Treat, in press). The PSCD subtype profiles were uniform across sex and race/ethnicity. Adolescents evincing a psychopathic trait propensity profile (elevated on all four PSCD domains) displayed the greatest number of arrests and higher overall externalizing psychopathology, compared to the other three latent classes, as well as higher internalizing psychopathology compared to adolescents with general delinquency. The PSCD provides a sound measure of psychopathic trait propensities in youth and our results offer investigators and clinicians a means for understanding person-centered psychopathic traits versus antisocial profiles among at-risk adolescents. Taken together, the current results may offer a viable approach for examining specific treatment targets based on PSCD subtype profiles.