The Trait Of Male Psychopathic Offender's Self

Psychopathy is a kind of personality disorder that displays in interpersonal relationship, emotion, life style, anti-social trait and other aspects, including deceiving, manoeuvring, self-centered, lacking the sense of responsibility, impulsion, stimulation seeking, poor ability of behavior controlling, feelings of shallow, lacking of compassion, guilty and self-blame, sexual relations confusion, as well as other violate ethic and anti-social behaviors. It has been found that, compared with non-psychopathic offenders, psychopathic offenders are more prone to violate social rules and laws, display more inhumane and extreme pattern of violations, have an earlier age for the first time of crime, their criminal activities are more extensive and diverse, recidivism rates are very high, and the proportions of problems in alcohol and substance abusing, violating disciplines in prison, family violence and other aspects are higher. Psychopathic offenders are a special group of offenders, and the investigation of those people's personality is of great theoretical and practical significance. In theory, the study of psychopathic offender's self can fill the blank in psychology and criminal jurisprudence. Thus far we haven't found any empirical study of psychopathic offenders' personality taken from the viewpoint of self. Self is core of personality and it plays a center role in individual's personality. The investigation to the trait of such a special group of psychopathic offender's self not only enriches the contents of self in personality psychology, but also provides important empirical materials and new research method to theories of criminal personality in personality criminal jurisprudence. In practice, the investigation to the trait of such a special group of psychopathic offender's self can reveal the key characteristic of personality distortion. It not only provides theoretical supports to criminal investigation, interrogation and adjudgement of offenders, makes the conviction to be more scientific, but also provides psychology basis to the education for this special kind of offenders, makes the pertinence of the education activities to be more stronger, it's effect to be more obvious, thus preventing offenders from returning crime, reducing crime rates/and maintaining social stability.Our study's aims are as follows: (1) Introduce in a western country's potent tool of evaluating psychopath, and provide a tool of great operational quality, reliability and validity for screening and assessing psychopath. (2) Reveal the basic characteristic of male psychopathic offenders. (3)Conduct systemic empirical study for some special contents of the psychopathic offender's self, such as self-worth, the generality of self-efficacy, self-consistency and memory self-reference effect. Thus find out the characteristic of psychopathic offender's self and further examine the validity of Hare Psychopathy Checklist.The study divides into two stages. In the first stage, we mainly revised the Psychopathy Checklist -Revised (PCL-R) and examined its reliability and validity. Then we assessed male offenders by the scale to find out the offenders' general characteristic of psychopathy. There are two parts in the first stage. The first part is carries on the revision to PCL-R. Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised is composed of three parts, namely the items of PCL-R, the item description of PCL-R and the interview compendium respectively. In the revision process, we adopted methods of translation and back translation to all the contents in PCL-R, and after the evaluation of 2 offenders according to the standard procedure strictly, we revised the items of the scale and other related materials in light of our country's present penal code and the practice of criminal execution. The important revises include: (1) Delete the item 19 of PCL-R (re-offending in the Parole period) which cannot be assessed in our country. (2) Revise the contents of item 20(diversification of criminal types) based on the penal code in continental legal system. (3) Delete those items which are not consistent with the actual situation of our country's offenders in the interview compendium. The results of the assessment to 30 male offenders by the revised scale are as follows: The internal consistency reliability of the scale is 0.86, which is almost the same with Hare's result of 0.85 on the manual of PCL-R in 2003; The scorer reliability, correlation between items and total score and other indexes of most items in the scale can meet the requirement of reliability in psychometrika. In addition, there is a significant correlation between the scores of offenders on the antisocial personality disorder scale and the total scores on PCL-R (r=0.43, p<0.01); The PCL-R scores of recidivisms who offended twice or more are significantly higher than scores of those first offenders (t=-2.459, p<0.05); In study 3, study 4 and study 5, there are significant differences between the psychopathic group and nonpsychopathic group. All of these prove that PCL-R has great validity. To sum up, the revised Hare PCL-R is of great reliability and validity, and it can be used as an efficient instrument for assessing the psychopathy personality disorder of offenders. In the second part, we assessed 60 male offenders by the revised PCL-R and the Offender's basic information Questionnaire established by ourselves. The results indicate that: (1) Demographic variables such as offenders' age, education level, marital status influence scores on PCL-R, and the affect mainly displays in following aspects: the larger of the offender's age the lower his PCL-R score; the higher of offender's education level the lower his PCL-R score, PCL-R scores of offenders who have received a junior college's education are the lowest; PCL-R scores of unmarried offenders are significantly higher than scores of those married and divorced offenders. (2) The influence of the criminological variables such as the number of crimes, criminal types and original term of sentence on the PCL-R score mainly displays in the number of crimes. Scores of recidivisms who offended more than once are significantly higher than scores of first offenders, and this indicates that psychopathy is closely related to repeated crime. The influences of the criminal type and original term of sentence on PCL-R are not obvious.In the second stage, we adopted many techniques such as structured interview, archival analytic, scale assessment, self-report and experimental method to carry on the systemic empirical study on psychopathic offender's self. The results showed that the characteristics of male psychopathic offender's self are as follows:(1) The difference between the psychopathic offenders' total scores on self-worth and the nonpsychopathic offenders' is not obvious. But the difference in the generality self-worth of social orientation between these two groups is significant. The psychopathic group's generality self-worth in social orientation is significantly lower than nonpsychopathic group's which indicates psychopathic offenders feel more social pressures compared with nonpsychopathic offenders.(2) The generality self-efficacy of the psychopathic group is significantly lower than nonpsychopathic group's. The result suggests that compared with those nonpsychopathic offenders, psychopathic offenders have less self-confidence in adapting to environment and dealing with different problems.(3)The psychopathic group's self-consistency or congruence is significantly lower than nonpsychopathic group's. Among the three dimensions of self-consistency or congruence, psychopathic offenders' scores on the inharmonic of the self and experience dimension and the stereotypy dimension are significantly lower than nonpsychopathic group's, which indicates that compared with nonpsychopathic offenders, psychopathic offenders' self and experience are more inharmonious with each other; their self-concept is more rigescent and straitlaced; their self-consistency or congruence is worse.(4) The psychopathic group does not appear obvious self-reference effect or mother-reference effect. All the experimental results of processing manner and judgement manner reveal that psychopathic offenders' self is chaotic, and their self-consciousness is deficient.The study findings of memory self-reference effect suggest us: psychopathic offenders' self is deficient, and they don't have clear self-consciousness. Similar results can be found in the study of their self-worth, the generality of self-efficacy and self-consistency or congruence: Their self-worth even significantly lower than those drug abusers' who are experiencing reeducation and labor rehabilitation. The generality self-efficacy of the psychopathic group is significantly lower than nonpsychopathic group's, and they have less self-confidence in adapting to environment and dealing with different problem; Their self and experience are inharmonious with each other, their self is rigescent, straitlaced and of poor harmony ability. According to these four study results, we can say that psychopathic offenders' self is not mature, which results in their childish trait just like children, and displaying some behavior characteristics that should only be found in childhood, such as self-centered, impulsion, poor ability of delay-of-gratification, stimulation seeking and so on. This unmature self may has some close relationship with the inmature of their cerebra, or may be related to their limitation of socialization.