Psychopathy and Anti-Social Personality Disorder (ASPD) Essay -- What I

Stories of the ‘psychopath’ are often intriguing to individuals in the general population as they receive exhaustive media coverage and are the basis for many interesting story lines in books, television and movies. The idea of the ‘psychopath’ is usually misunderstood and merged with other dispositions such as Anti-Social Personality Disorder (ASPD), but these concepts are two distinct entities. Defining a ‘psychopath’ is a difficult task. Frist, psychopathy is a trait and not a disorder (Strickland et al, 2013). Characterizing psychopathy using the Diagnostic Statistical Manual Fifth Edition (DSM-V) has demonstrated effective trait-based coverage in terms of psychopathy and its facets that are identifiable through the Personality Inventory for DSM-V (PID-V) (Strickland et al, 2013). The identification of psychopathy as a trait indicates that individuals with this specific trait possess patterns of thoughts, feelings or actions that are distinguishable. For example, the Five Factor Model (Costa and Wildiger, 2002) describes five broad dimensions of personality that are used to describe human personality. Individuals all possess some degree of these identifiable traits, however they are expressed in different comportments upon a continuum. Possessing the average trait has not historically bred problems (Costa and Wildiger, 2002) but, when individuals approach an extreme end of a trait (extremely low or extremely high) then there may be indication of some kind of personality disorder. Hence, the term psychopathy and ASPD are often used interchangeably as individuals that demonstrate extreme forms of psychopathy are often diagnosed with ASPD (Strickland et al, 2013). The DSM-V aims to correct this binder. The dimensional persona... ... Psychopathy Scores Predict Adolescent Inpatient Aggression. Assessment, 10(1), 102-112. Strickland, C., Drislane, L., Lucy, M., Krueger, R., & Patrick, C. (2013). Characterizing Psychopathy Using DSM-5 Personality Traits. Assessment, 20(3), 327-338 . Szalavitz, M. (n.d.). Why Do Some People Become Psychopaths?. MSN Healthy Living. Retrieved October 23, 2013, from http://healthyliving.msn.com/health-wellness/why-do-some-people-become-psychopaths-1?pageart=2 Woodworth, M., & Porter, S. (2002). In cold blood: characteristics of criminal homicides as a function of psychopathy. Journal of abnormal psychology, 111(3), 436. Winko v. British Columbia (Forensic Psychiatric Institute), [1999] 2 S.C.R. 625 World Health Organization. 2001b. Burden of Mental and Behavioural Disorders. http://www.who.int/whr/2001/chapter2/en/index.html (accessed March 21, 2008).