Psychopathy and Interpersonal Functioning in a University Sample: A Hierarchical Perspective Using the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality: A Registered Report

Psychopathic personality disorder (PPD) is a widely recognized disorder that has been associated with high levels of dysfunction across clinical, forensic, occupational, and social settings. The psychopathy construct displays robust connections to social and interpersonal dysfunction; however, research investigating these associations thus far largely relies on total or domain-level scores. This study aimed to employ a higher degree of abstraction to examine associations between psychopathy symptoms and various interpersonal outcomes at different levels of the psychopathy trait hierarchy. The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (Cooke et al., 2012) was used, allowing for the highest level of nuance, with 33 individual symptom scales. A variety of different interpersonal outcome variables were collected using multiple methods. A university sample (N = 669) was used and informant reports (N = 337) were collected. Consistent with our hypotheses, correlation analyses indicated that there were distinct, and at times unique, associations between symptoms and interpersonal outcomes. Furthermore, regression models and dominance analyses showed taking a symptom-level approach can add incremental information over factor scores, particularly for self-reported outcomes. Future research should seek to replicate these findings across populations to elucidate any consistent patterns that could aid in the assessment and treatment of PPD.