Psychopathy more misunderstood than it first appears

The reality of psychopathy is far from that portrayed in popular films like The Silence of the Lambs. Photo / File

Think "psychopath" and your mind might likely turn to twisted pop culture characters like Hannibal Lecter, Michael Myers, Norman Bates or Patrick Bateman.

But psychopathy is a widely misunderstood form of personality disorder, according to a leading Kiwi psychology researcher, next week giving a lecture on the subject.

"News media, films and television shows often depict sadists, criminal masterminds and evil dictators as suffering from psychopathy but these depictions bear little resemblance to most of the people identified as psychopathic by scientific methods," said Professor of Psychology Devon Polaschek, of the University of Waikato.

"The scientific literature on psychopathy is also confused - psychopathy is more complex, more interesting, and at the same time, more ordinary than it first appears."

In her inaugural professorial lecture this month, Polaschek will discuss the modern scientific understandings of psychopathy.

Drawing on her longstanding research programme on high-risk violent prisoners, she will consider how some people become psychopathic criminals, whether they can be released safely into our communities again, and whether the psychological treatments made available to them are helping them change their psychopathy.

A forensic clinical psychologist and professor of psychology and crime science, Polaschek works in the University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the newly established Institute for Security and Crime Science.

She completed a diploma in clinical psychology at the University of Canterbury and a PhD at Victoria University.

Her research expertise includes criminal behaviour, violent offending, imprisonment parole, sexual offending, offender rehabilitation, offender reintegration, family violence perpetrators and what works with offenders.

Work by her Waikato University colleague, clinical psychologist Dr Armon Tamatea, found that in New Zealand court decisions since 1985, references to a person being a psychopath - either as a throw-away jibe or from a diagnostic test - have been made more than 120 times.

A description by the Department of Corrections, borrowed from renowned Canadian criminal psychologist Professor Robert Hare, also mentions a "persistent disregard for social norms and conventions"and a "failure to maintain enduring attachments to people, principles, or goals".

Some of Polaschek's earlier work has found that PCL-R, a measurement tool used by the Department of Corrections that involved scoring a person on a range of psychopathic characteristics based on a combination of clinical interviews and personal history, had limited previous studies into what the notion of psychopathy was.

Her free lecture, Mean, misunderstood, and mistreated: Psychopathy in the wild and in prison, will be held at the university's Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts on Tuesday, May 30, starting at 5.15pm.