Date of Award

January 2013

Degree Type

Open Access Thesis

Document Type

Master Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Dustin B. Wygant

Department Affiliation

Psychology

Abstract

Although Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD) represents the closest diagnostic equivalent to psychopathy in the DSM-IV, it has long been recognized as failing to capture the full range of the construct. The current study examined the degree to which boldness, a trait domain within the triarchic conceptualization of psychopathy (Patrick et al., 2009) that captures fearlessness, dominance, and low stress reactivity, represents a distinct difference between psychopathy and APD. Utilizing a sample of 108 male prison inmates, the current study examined the extent to which boldness, relative to meanness and disinhibition (indexed by the Triarchic Psychopathy measure; Patrick, 2010), accounted for incremental variance beyond APD symptom counts (indexed by the SCID-II APD module) in predicting the PCL-R total score. Hierarchical linear regression analyses were conducted in which the SCID-II APD symptom count was entered in the first step of the model, and the three Triarchic domains were entered in the second step. The results indicate that Boldness is a significant trait that helps to explain differences between APD and psychopathy.

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