Should The Psychopathic Checklist Be Misused?

One of the main issues of the Psychopathic Checklist (PCL-R) is that it is very subject and therefore can be easily misused. Although any test can be misused, the Psychopathic Checklist (PCL-R) has a higher risk of being misused due to its extreme subjectivity. A psychologist did investigate the issue of misusing the Psychopathic Checklist (PCL-R) and found two real-life examples of such incidents (Edens, 2001; Edens et al., 2001). Mental health experts play an important role in many cases involving suspects with antisocial personality behaviour. Therefore, it is important that issues such as adversarial allegiance, conformation bias and the impact of the traits, culture and background of the evaluator has on the outcome of the test are discussed in the

Thus, it is important to shed light on the few research papers that have discussed this issue. A few research papers did investigate the Psychopathic Checklist (PCL-R) on imprisoned females (Loucks, 1995; Neary, 1990; Strachan, 1993; Tien, Lamb, Bond, Gillstrom, & Paris, 1993). These research papers have introduced us to some important issues that should be taken into account when discussing gender-biasness in the Psychopathic Checklist (PCL-R). One of this issues is that on average women scored 35% less compared to the outcome of the test for men. The factor structure did also change when the Psychopathic Checklist (PCL-R) was used to assess women. These issues might suggest that the Psychopathic Checklist (PCL-R) might not be as gender-neutral as we thought it was. However, it should be noted that these investigations included a limited number of participants ranging from 55 to 130. Thus, no conclusion could be made from previous research papers. However, it helps us predict the outcomes for coming investigations and gives us a general overview of the issue. It did also present us with some interesting