Can we use Hare’s psychopathy model within forensic and non-forensic populations? An empirical investigation.

Although psychopathy construct (SRP-SF) was assessed among various samples, prior research did not investigate whether the model proposed by Hare and colleagues can be used to capture psychopathy scores derived from forensic and non-forensic populations. The main objective of the current study was to test dimensionality, construct validity, and factorial invariance of the SRP-SF within prison (N = 730) and student (N = 2,506) samples. Our results indicate that the SRP-SF measure cannot be used in the same way within forensic and non-forensic samples, which may be due to the inclusion of criminal/antisocial traits as an integral part of psychopathy.