Although we all have more or less clear the characteristics that define a psychopath, it is not always easy to identify people who suffer from this personality disorder or, at least, to do so objectively. To facilitate the work, the Canadian psychologist and researcher Robert Hare developed the Psychopathy Assessment Scale (PCL), and later its revised version (PCL-R), which today is the most widely used tool. used by experts around the world to diagnose cases of psychopathy.
Although there are many definitions and nuances in this concept, to develop his test Hare relied on the theories of Hervey Cleckley, an American psychiatrist who in the mid-twentieth century defined the features of psychopathy in his best-known work: The Mask of Sanity ( The Mask of Sanity). In it, he introduced terms such as “semantic aphasia” to refer to the inability of psychopaths to express and understand common emotional experiences.
This is how a psychopath is detected
The Psychopathy Assessment Scale assesses 20 characteristics that usually define a psychopath , including self-centeredness, lack of empathy, manipulative personality, absence of guilt, lack of self-control, parasitic lifestyle, or behavior problems. These variables were selected from an original list of 100 items that had been traditionally used to distinguish prisoners with psychopathic traits from other types of offenders .
The 20 characteristics of the test can be grouped into two groups or factors: one of them refers to individual characteristics of the subject such as his personality or his affectivity (interpersonal factor, which has two dimensions: interpersonal and affective), and the other brings together aspects that they relate the way this person has of relating to their environment (social deviation, with two dimensions: lifestyle and antisocial behaviors).
The analysis of all these variables allows diagnosing people with a psychopath profile and also predicting possible violent behavior in prison settings.
The Psychopathy Assessment Scale collects information from an interview with the subject in question, from the observation of his behavior and from the study of his previous history. Each of the 20 variables is scored from 0 to 2, so that the maximum score that can be obtained is 40. People who obtain results greater than 30 can be classified as psychopaths. Furthermore, scores above 25 alert us to the possibility that the subject exhibits antisocial and violent behaviors.
