"People I speak with automatically think, 'Well, what's in that article that makes him so upset? What's he so afraid of?'" "I find this action to be completely inconsistent with the man I had respect and affection for," says Stephen Hart of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, a collaborator and former student of Hare's. But they say Hare's use of legal threats has at best subverted the peer review process that is the crux of modern scientific progress, and could at worst encourage junior researchers in the field of forensic psychology to pursue other lines of research. People familiar with the matter say the scale's author, Robert Hare of the University of British Columbia, deserves only partial blame for the delay, to be shared with the American Psychological Association (APA), the journal's publisher. A high score on the PCL-R is used to diagnose psychopathy. The article in question concerns the Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R), which is commonly administered in serious criminal cases to help make sentencing decisions as well as in prisons and psychiatric hospitals to determine suitability for release. It finally appeared in the journal's June issue, but the whole affair has raised questions about how legal threats can impact the progress of psychological science. In the process the paper, which was accepted for publication in 2007 by Psychological Assessment, was delayed three years. PCL-R abbrev.A leading psychopathy researcher has used the threat of legal action to have changes made to a research paper critical of a widely used criminological rating scale he developed 20 years ago. Also called the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. Hare found that 28 per cent of male prison inmates in the US scored at or above this cut-off score, and research in the UK has found a similar proportion. According to this criterion, a person with true psychopathy has both an emotional disorder and a propensity to manifest antisocial behaviour. The range of possible scores is 0–40, and the conventional cut-off score for diagnosing psychopathy is 30. Factor analysis of scores from the Psychopathy Checklist and the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised has consistently identified two correlated but distinct factors, the first associated with affective and interpersonal attributes, such as superficial charm, selfishness, callousness, manipulativeness, pathological lying, lack of empathy, and shallow affect, and the second associated with socially deviant behaviour and lifestyle, including proneness to boredom, parasitic lifestyle, impulsivity, early behavioural problems, irresponsibility, and delinquent behaviour. Each item is scored from 0 (not applicable) to 2 (highly applicable) on the basis of a semi-structured interview and collateral file review. It comprises 20 items associated with behavioural, affective, and interpersonal attributes of psychopathy, taken from the classic description of the syndrome in The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Reinterpret the So-called Psychopathic Personality (1941) by the US neuropsychiatrist Hervey (Milton) Cleckley (1903–1984). An instrument for measuring psychopathy, developed by the Canadian criminologist Robert D(ouglas) Hare (born 1934) and published commercially in 1991, based on an earlier Psychopathy Checklist (PCL) that he published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences in 1980.
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