This chapter suggests that delinquency conceals two distinct categories of individuals, each with a unique natural history and etiology: A small group engages in antisocial behavior of one sort or another at every life stage, whereas a larger group is antisocial only during adolescence. According to the theory of life-course-persistent antisocial behavior, children's neuropsychological problems interact cumulatively with their criminogenic environments across development, culminating m a pathological personality. According to the theory of adolescence-limited antisocial behavior, a contemporary maturity gap encourages teens to mimic antisocial behavior in ways that are normative and adjustive. There are marked individual differences in the stability of antisocial behavior. The chapter reviews the mysterious relationship between age and antisocial behavior. Some youths who refrain from antisocial behavior may, for some reason, not sense the maturity gap and therefore lack the hypothesized motivation for experimenting with crime.

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Adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy.

Virtually all current theories of choice under risk or uncertainty are cognitive and consequentialist. They assume that people assess the desirability and likelihood of possible outcomes of choice alternatives and integrate this information through some type of expectation-based calculus to arrive at decision. The authors propose an alternative theoretical perspective, the risk-as-feelings hypothesis, that highlights the role of affect experienced at the moment of decision making. Drawing on research from clinical, physiological, and other subfield of psychology, they show that emotional reactions to risky situations often drive behavior. The risk-as-feelings hypothesis is shown to explain a wide range of phenomena that have resisted interpretation in cognitive-consequentialist terms.

Risk as Feelings

Virtually all current theories of choice under risk or uncertainty are cognitive and consequentialist. They assume that people assess the desirability and likelihood of possible outcomes of choice alternatives and integrate this information through some type of expectation-based calculus to arrive at a decision. The authors propose an alternative theoretical perspective, the risk-as-feelings hypothesis, that highlights the role of affect experienced at the moment of decision making. Drawing on research from clinical, physiological, and other subfields of psychology, they show that emotional reactions to risky situations often diverge from cognitive assessments of those risks. When such divergence occurs, emotional reactions often drive behavior. The risk-as-feelings hypothesis is shown to explain a wide range of phenomena that have resisted interpretation in cognitive-consequentialist terms.

Risk as feelings.

reoffending than those who completed treatment. The predictors of nonsexual violent recidivism and general (any) recidivism were similar to those predictors found among nonsexual criminals (e.g., prior violent offenses, age, juvenile deliquency). Our results suggest that applied risk assessments of sexual offenders should consider separately the offender's risk for sexual and nonsexual recidivism. Assessing chronicity is crucial for clients whose sexual behaviors have brought them into conflict with the law. Many exceptional criminal justice policies, such as postsentence detention (e.g., Anderson & Masters, 1992), lifetime community supervision, and community notification, target those sexual offenders likely to reoffend. Clinicians need to judge whether the client's behaviors are truly atypical of the individual (as the client would like us to believe) or whether the client merits a virtually permanent label as a sexual offender.

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Predicting relapse: a meta-analysis of sexual offender recidivism studies.

A meta-analysis of 82 recidivism studies (1,620 findings from 29,450 sexual offenders) identified deviant sexual preferences and antisocial orientation as the major predictors of sexual recidivism for both adult and adolescent sexual offenders. Antisocial orientation was the major predictor of violent recidivism and general (any) recidivism. The review also identified some dynamic risk factors that have the potential of being useful treatment targets (e.g., sexual preoccupations, general self-regulation problems). Many of the variables commonly addressed in sex offender treatment programs (e.g., psychological distress, denial of sex crime, victim empathy, stated motivation for treatment) had little or no relationship with sexual or violent recidivism.

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The Characteristics of Persistent Sexual Offenders: A Meta-Analysis of Recidivism Studies.

Two correlated factors have been identified in the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL), a valide and reliable instrument for the assessment of psychopathy in male prison populations. Factor 1 measures a selfish, remorseless, and exploitative use of others, and Factor 2 measures a chronically unstable and antisocial life-style. We examined the psychometric properties of the factor solutions and a variety of correlates of the two factors

Two-factor conceptualization of psychopathy: construct validity and assessment implications

The Axis II Work Group of the Task Force on DSM—IV has expressed concern that antisocial personality disorder (APD) criteria are too long and cumbersome and that they focus on antisocial behaviors rather than personality traits central to traditional conceptions of psychopathy and to international criteria. We describe an alternative to the approach taken in the rev. 3rd ed. of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM—III—R ; American Psychiatric Association, 1987 ), namely, the revised Psychopathy Checklist. We also discuss the multisite APD field trials designed to evaluate and compare four criteria sets: the DSM—III—R criteria, a shortened list of these criteria, the criteria for dyssocial personality disorder from the 10th ed. of the International Classification of Diseases ( World Health Organization, 1990 ), and a 10-item criteria set for psychopathic personality disorder derived from the revised Psychopathy Checklist.

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Psychopathy and the DSM-IV Criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder

The revised Psychopathy Checklist (PCL) is a 20-item scale scored from interview and file information. Analyses of data from 5 prison samples (N= 92 5) and 3 forensic psychiatric samples (N= 356) indicate that the revised PCL resembles its 22-item predecessor in all important respects. It has excellent psychometric properties, and it measures 2 correlated factors that were cross-validated both within and between samples. Correlations between the original PCL and the revised version approached unity for both the factors and the full scale. We conclude that the revised PCL measures the same construct as the original and that the PCL is a reliable and valid instrument for the assessment of psychopathy in male forensic populations.

The revised Psychopathy Checklist: Reliability and factor structure.

Factor structure of the Psychopathy Checklist.

The Psychopathy Checklist (PCL; Hare, 1980) and its revision (PCL-R; Hare, 1985a, in press) are clinical rating scales that provide researchers and clinicians with reliable and valid assessments of psychopathy. Their development was spurred largely by dissatisfactions with the ways in which other assessment procedures defined and measured psychopathy (Hare, 1980, 1985b).

Timothy J. Harpur

Papers

Two-factor conceptualization of psychopathy: construct validity and assessment implications

Psychopathy and the DSM-IV Criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder

The revised Psychopathy Checklist: Reliability and factor structure.

Factor structure of the Psychopathy Checklist.

The Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R)