Psychopathy as Psychopathology: Beyond the Clinical Utility of the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised

In an article entitled “Psychopathy: A Clinical Construct Whose Time Has Come,” Hare (1996) demonstrated that psychopathy is a construct with broad relevance for both the criminal justice system and clinical psychology. More specifically, he argued that the availability of a reliable method for identifying the construct has enabled researchers to (a) establish psychopathy’s association with clinically significant behaviors such as violent and nonviolent crimes, substance abuse, and criminal recidivism and (b) document its association with etiologically relevant processes that include relatively specific physiological, learning, cognitive, emotional, and language anomalies.