ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised conceptualization of psychopathy, it is important to note that an alternative model, the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality also features deception. It draws on psychopathy, including its relationship to general deception, and more specifically, malingering. The chapter examines the contributions of the criminological model to understanding of the motivations to malinger. It addresses the vulnerability of psychopathy measures to positive impression management. The chapter explores specific characteristics of deception that are associated with psychopathy via a reanalysis of an extensive data set on the Psychopathy Checklist-Screening Version. The lack of group differences for psychopathy-and, in supplementary analyses, the antisocial personality disorder-suggests that the capacity to malinger is unlikely to be linked to the clinical classification of psychopathy. The clinical issue then becomes more refined, with the goal of establishing whether certain features of psychopathy are associated with a greater likelihood of successful feigning.