These features may 'promote overdiagnosis of psychopathy,' they wrote.Īccording to a document Hare has circulated to journalists and other researchers, Skeem and Cooke's original manuscript misrepresented Hare's work by incorrectly paraphrasing a 2005 paper published in Current Psychiatry Reports, taking words out of context from it and other papers to support the argument that researchers have viewed criminal behavior as 'important' or 'central' to psychopathy.īased on this disagreement and others Hare and a colleague lobbied a senior editor of Psychological Assessment to get Skeem and Cooke to reexamine their paper, which had already passed peer review, and make revisions. They say it leaves out certain characteristics such as low anxiety that are central to the disorder and focuses too much on criminal behavior. In their finally published critique of the Hare checklist, Jennifer Skeem of the University of California, Irvine, and David Cooke of Glasgow Caledonian University argue that forensic psychologists and psychiatrists have wrongly come to view the PCL-R as a complete description of psychopathy. '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. 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.

Psychopathy checklist revised hare