About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

22 Behav. Sci. & L. 1 (2004)

handle is hein.journals/bsclw22 and id is 1 raw text is: 



Behavioral Sciences and the Law
Behav. Sci. Law 22: 1-4 (2004)
Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10. 1002/bsl.580


                      Introduction to the Special Issue
                      on   Juvenile Psychopathy,
                      Volume 2


                      Juvenile Psychopathy:
                      Informing the Debate



A recent explosion of interest in the topic of juvenile psychopathy has been
accompanied  by sharp debate about whether the construct of psychopathy can
validly and should be applied to youth. In the second consecutive special issue of
Behavioral Sciences and the Law devoted to the topic of juvenile psychopathy, we
present additional empirical articles to inform this debate. As noted in the first issue
(Petrila & Skeem, 2003), three underlying controversies seem paramount: (i) the
validity of extending adult models of psychopathy downward to youth, given
patterns of personality development; (ii) the malleability or treatability of psycho-
pathy-like features during youth; and (iii) the ethical and moral appropriateness of
assessing psychopathy during youth.
   This volume contains six articles on juvenile psychopathy focused on three
general topics, including the psychometrics of juvenile psychopathy measures; the
relationship between psychopathy-like features and treatment progress; and a
road-map  for assessing the validity of psychopathy in youth.


                PSYCHOMETRICS OF JUVENILE
                  PSYCHOPATHY MEASURES

Several articles in this special issue assess the psychometric properties of measures of
juvenile psychopathy. These articles emphasize the utility of these measures in
assessing risk for violence, expressing the measures' chief practical appeal. By
identifying useful, youth-focused measures that appear to reliably assess something
that looks like psychopathy (Hart, Watt, & Vincent, 2002), these articles provide
a foundation for determining whether psychopathy is a valid and developmentally
appropriate construct for youth.
   In the first paper of this volume, Corrodo and his colleagues prospectively
examine the utility of the Youth Version of the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL:YV;
Forth, Kosson, &  Hare, 2003)  in predicting violent recidivism for 197 male
adolescent offenders. These authors used PCL:YV clusters of psychopathy-like
features, as organized by traditional two-factor (Hare, 1991) and revised three factor
(Cooke &  Michie, 2001) psychopathy models, to predict recidivism. The authors
found  that the  PCL:YV's   utility in predicting violent recidivism chiefly
was attributable to its summary of nonspecific antisocial features (i.e. traditional


Copyright (0 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

profiles profiles most