Psychopathy in Relation to Potentially

¶ … Psychopathy in Relation to Potentially Traumatic Events and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Among Female Prisoners: The Mediating Role of Borderline Personality Disorder Traits by Blonigen et al.

In their research, Blonigen et al. sought to examine the link between psychopathy and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the potential mediating role of borderline personality disorder in female prisoners. Using a non-random sample of female prisoners, the researchers used the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) to identify the facets of psychopathy, and determined the associations between those markers and potentially traumatic events (PTE) and symptoms of PTSD. What they found was that the Interpersonal and Affective facets of the PCL-R were unrelated to both PTE and PTSD, the Lifestyle and Antisocial were each associated with PTE; the Antisocial facet was associated with PTSD symptoms. Moreover, borderline personality disorder traits fully accounted for the association between the Antisocial facet and both PTE and PTSD, while the Lifestyle fact contributed incrementally to the prediction of PTE (Blonigen et al., 2012).

There were some methodological issues with Blonigen's study. First, they screened their study participants, eliminating people who were not set to be released and did not have evidence of cognitive impairment, psychosis, or bipolar disorder (Blonigen et al., 2012). That selection process seems as if it would skew results. It is not unusual for those identified disorders to co-exist with borderline personality disorder. Moreover, how does one conduct a study focusing on studying psychopathology, but them eliminate people who have a prior history of psychosis? Those named problems are frequent in the prison population and eliminating them from the study eliminates a large part of the prison population, which means that the study results might provide an interesting point for beginning future research, but does not provide sufficient information about the average prison population.

Furthermore, there is a difference between a potentially traumatic event and an event that can trigger PTSD. Looking at historical physical assault, assault with a weapon, captivity, sexual assault and unwanted or uncomfortable sexual experience seems like a broad description of activities to lead to PTSD. Moreover, they not only asked the subjects about this in the interview process, but also looked at their files to see their history (Blonigen et al., 2012). While it is possible for someone to suffer from PTSD as a the result of a childhood assault or an uncomfortable sexual experience, it is also likely that someone is either no longer suffering PTSD from a historical event that led to PTSD or that someone did not suffer from PTSD, therefore the utility of the PTE dimension for the study's purposes seemed questionable, except perhaps to demonstrate that PTE could trigger borderline behavior in people who were predisposed to borderline behavior.

The effect of the Psychopathy Checklist- Revised in Capital Cases: Mock Jurors' Responses to the Label of Psychopathy by Cox et al.

The researchers sought to determine whether the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) had a prejudicial effect on mock jury members during the sentencing phase of a capital murder trial. There results did not show prejudice towards those defendants labeled psychopaths by the PCL-R. Instead, the mock jurors were most likely to sentence dangerous defendants to death, regardless of the PCL-R label attached to those defendants. In fact, defendants who were considered a high-risk of future violence but were not psychopaths were most likely to be sentenced to death.

This study was fascinating in many ways. First, like many studies, it suffered from a representation sample problem. The participants were first year psychology students, which means that they may already have been more educated than many jurors, particularly in the issue of psychopathy. However, the researchers address this issue by citing a study that indicates no difference in mock juror and real juror results. The study eliminated the jurors who were morally/ethically opposed to the death penalty, which reflects the reality of jury selection in capital cases. However, they also excluded a student for failing to answer some of the factual questions about the case correctly. This omission is actually troubling, because it assumes that jurors could always answer factual questions about a case correctly. That is not the case; in fact, jurors are never given a qualification test like that. Excluding someone who misunderstood the facts of the case, in any way, means that one is taking the research study further outside of the realm of actual jury trials. Sometimes jurors are confused, and mock jury experience should reflect that possibility.