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This study aims to collect data on how, and to what extent, psychopathy assessments are used in the Canadian court system. It will do so by conducting a review of Canadian court case summaries, mapping frequencies, field interrater reliability, general purposes for using psychopathy assessments, its exposure to adversarial challenges, and how psychopathy is described in court by expert witnesses.

This registration contains the full protocol for our review of ethnicity and the predictive validity of the PCL-R. As of the date of registration, the systematic review has not yet begun. Information about authorship, the rationale and design of our review, and planned analyses can be found in: Ethnicity and predictive validity of PCL-R pre-registration.pdf

This registration contains the full protocol of our review of the association between sample size and number of foci in fMRI research on broadly defined psychopathy. As of the date of registration the research has not begun. Information about the authorship, rationale, design, and planned analyses can be found in: Sample size and fMRI foci in psychopathy.pdf

This registration contains the full protocol of our review of fMRI research on PCL-R psychopathy. As of the date of registration the systematic review has not begun. Information about the authorship, rationale, design, and planned analyses can be found in: fMRI replication PCL-R pre-registration.pdf

The psychopathy project – a term used here to describe the various efforts to establish psychopathy as an object of science – has existed in one form or another for over two hundred years. At present, it enjoys wide popularity in the social sciences as well as in popular imagination. The present work is an analysis of the psychopathy project’s logical coherence. The present work examines, among other things, the claims that psychopathy is either a medical condition or a mental illness. Also examined is the logic of various causal theories of psychopathy as well as the argument that a diagnosis of psychopathy is not an act of moral condemnation. In this context, the logical continuity between modern psychopathy research and the late 19th century theory of degeneration is discussed. Finally, a number of rhetorical strategies used by the psychopathy project are studied. The work concludes by providing recommendations for improving the logical coherence and intellectual integrity of the psychopathy project. Such improvement is seen as necessary, since throughout the present work the project is shown to suffer from a number of serious logical confusions and deliberate mischaracterizations of its scientific merits.

This paper provides a critical methodological analysis of current validation and research methods for mental disorders. The purpose of this paper is threefold: First, we will examine the construct validation program and the use of factor analysis in psychiatric validation studies. Second, we will point out some limitations to linear common-factor analysis in this context. This will be done through hypothetical scenarios of mental disorders which do not conform to the linear common-factor model. Third, we will briefly provide some suggestions for dealing with these limitations. These suggestions are intended to alert the researcher to alternative statistical models, such as the unfolding model and the non-linear factor model, to be used in the service of mental disorder classification and validation.Dept. of Psychology. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis1999 .J32. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 39-02, page: 0595. Adviser: Shelagh Towson. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 1999.