Diane S. Strub, Mette K. F. Kreis, & Stephen D. Hart. Introduction ... CAPP (Cooke, Hart, Logan, & Michie, 2004). ... versus Other primary diagnoses using t tests.
A New Approach to the Assessment of Psychopathy: Discriminant and Convergent Validity of the CAPP Across Personality Disorders Clusters Diane S. Strub, Mette K. F. Kreis, & Stephen D. Hart Introduction Recently, Cooke and colleagues started work on the development of a new measure of psychopathy, the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality or CAPP (Cooke, Hart, Logan, & Michie, 2004). The CAPP was constructed using a lexical approach to assessment, in which symptoms of psychopathy are framed as traitdescriptive adjectives falling in 6 domains: Attachment, Behavioral, Cognitive, Dominance, Emotional, and Self. In this study, we asked mental health professionals recruited via the Internet to make symptom ratings for actual patients suffering from various forms of mental disorder. The symptoms rated included those from the CAPP, as well as “foils” (i.e., symptoms unrelated to psychopathy). We predicted that when clinicians were asked to rate patients with a primary diagnosis of DSM-IV Cluster B personality disorders (PDs) -- a group that includes people with conditions similar to psychopathic PD -- they would give higher severity ratings for symptoms in the various CAPP domains, but not for foil symptoms, than when they were asked to rate patients with Cluster A or C PDs or with no PD.
Method
Primary Diagnosis of Target Patients
Participants: 30 mental health professionals recruited via the internet from various professional organizations, including IAFMHS. Procedure: Participants completed an online survey. They were asked to identify two “target” patients with different primary diagnoses: Cluster A, B, or C personality disorders or no personality disorder. Target diagnoses were assigned randomly. For each target patient, participants were asked to make severity ratings for the 33 CAPP symptoms and 9 foil symptoms on a 7-point scale (0 = absent, 6 = extremely severe). Analyses: We compared mean symptom rating for target patients with Cluster B primary diagnoses versus Other primary diagnoses using t tests.
t test:
Cluster B (N =15)
Other (N = 44)
p
