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The three‐factor structure of the Levenson Self‐Report Psychopathy Scale: Fool's gold or true gold? A study in a sample of Italian adult non‐clinical participants
Author(s) -
Somma Antonella,
Fossati Andrea,
Patrick Christopher,
Maffei Cesare,
Borroni Serena
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
personality and mental health
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.193
H-Index - 22
eISSN - 1932-863X
pISSN - 1932-8621
DOI - 10.1002/pmh.1267
Subject(s) - psychology , psychopathy , clinical psychology , confirmatory factor analysis , scale (ratio) , sample (material) , developmental psychology , personality , social psychology , structural equation modeling , statistics , physics , chemistry , mathematics , chromatography , quantum mechanics
The major aim of this study was to evaluate the factor structure of the Italian translation of the Levenson Self‐Report Psychopathy Scale (LSRP) in a sample of 740 community dwelling adult participants. Hull method, minimum average partial analysis and quasi‐inferential parallel analysis techniques were used to identify a three‐factor solution that appeared broadly consistent with previous work. The three factors exhibited reliability coefficients >0.70, and the three‐factor structure was adequately reproduced across gender, educational level and civil status strata (median congruence coefficients = 0.94, 0.93 and 0.95 respectively) and remained largely unchanged when the effect of participants' age was controlled for (median factor score correlation = 0.99). Although Factor 3 in our study was demarcated mainly by reverse‐keyed items, the LSRP factors yielded meaningful relations with retrospective measures of antisocial behaviour in adolescence and HEXACO personality traits and were conceptually consistent with the triarchic model of psychopathy of Patrick, Fowles and Krueger (2009). Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.