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Psychopathic Personality Traits, Genetic Risk, and Gene-Environment Correlations

NCJ Number
236036
Journal
Criminal Justice and Behavior Volume: 9 Issue: 38 Dated: September 2011 Pages: 896-912
Author(s)
Kevin M. Beaver; J. C. Barnes; Joshua S. May; Joseph A. Schwartz
Date Published
September 2011
Length
17 pages
Annotation
This study investigates psychopathy and psychopathic traits as some of the strongest correlates to serious violent criminal behavior.
Abstract
There is a great deal of evidence indicating that psychopathy and psychopathic traits represent some of the strongest correlates to serious violent criminal behavior. As a result, there has been a recent surge of behavioral genetic studies examining the genetic and environmental factors that may be related to the development of psychopathy. The current study extends this line of research by analyzing a sample of kinship pairs from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to estimate the extent to which genetic factors relate to measures of psychopathic personality traits created from the five factor model. Moreover, the authors also test for a series of geneenvironment correlations between genetic risk for psychopathic personality traits and measures of parental negativity. The results of the analyses revealed that genetic factors explained between .37 and .44 of the variance in measures of psychopathy. Additional statistical models indicated the presence of geneenvironment correlations between parental negativity and genetic risk for psychopathic personality traits. (Published Abstract)