Psychopathic killers: A meta-analytic review of the psychopathy-homicide nexus

By B. Fox, M. Delisi. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 2019

87 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Despite cultural notions that psychopathy and homicide are strongly linked, there has not been a quantitative meta-analytic review of the association between psychopathy and homicide offending. The current study meta-analyzed data from 29 unique samples from 22 studies that included 2603 homicide offenders, and found that the mean psychopathy score on the PCL-R for a homicide offender was 21.2 (95% CI = 18.9–23.6). This score is indicative of moderate psychopathy. The overall effect size r = 0.68 was large, and effect sizes intensified in studies of more severe manifestations of homicide including sexual homicide (r = 0.71), sadistic homicide (r = 0.78), serial homicide (r = 0.74), and multi-offender homicide (r = 0.80). Current study findings make clear that psychopathy and homicide are importantly linked and that psychopathic personality functioning is a significant risk factor for various forms of lethal violence.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f670170611d18874c124c3956096f4b7d13001d