Personality-Based Assessment of Psychopathy: Comparison of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality and the Elemental Psychopathy Assessment

Psychopathic personality disorder (PPD) is a widely researched construct characterized by severe dysfunction in affective, interpersonal and behavioral domains. Inconsistencies across different theoretical formulations and operationalizations have major implications for research and practice. Two separate personality-based perspectives of psychopathy have been proposed, one anchored within the influential five factor model (FFM) of personality and the comprehensive assessment of psychopathic personality (CAPP) model, which was specifically designed as an inclusive concept map of PPD. The current study evaluated the empirical overlap between the CAPP and the FFM-based models of psychopathy to determine the convergences and divergences in providing a personality-based perspective on psychopathy. Participants were undergraduate students (n = 924) who completed the CAPP-Self-Report (CAPP-SR) and the Elemental Psychopathy Assessment-Short Form (EPA-SF). Results indicated significant convergent validity associations between CAPP-SR scales and conceptually relevant EPA-SF scales (range = .30-.74; median discriminant associations range = .10-.36). Furthermore, an exploratory factor analysis supported the conceptual overlap between the CAPP-SR and EPA-SF scales as representing personality-based models of psychopathy, yielding a 4-factor structure that reflected antagonism, disinhibition, emotional stability, and narcissism. Overall, the findings support the convergence of the CAPP and FFM-based PPD models, at both a basic trait and higher order level.