Editorial

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Criminal Psychology, Volume 6, Issue 2.

Welcome to our second issue of 2016. We are delighted to once again be able to present papers that address a wide range of issues and bring together contributions from researchers from around the world.

Responding to calls for further consideration of the cross-cultural validity of the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL: YV; Forth et al., 2003), Sheperd and colleagues examine the predictive accuracy of the PCL: YV and its subcomponents in an ethnically diverse sample of 175 young male offenders. Results indicate that PCL: YV total and domain scores were comparable across ethnic groups. Furthermore, the PCL: YV significantly predicted both general and violent recidivism in the aggregate sample over an 18-month follow-up. However, when results were disaggregated by ethnic grouping, the PCL: YV consistently appeared to be a stronger predictor of recidivism for Australian participants with an English speaking background compared to indigenous and culturally and linguistically diverse participants. The authors conclude that there is a need for further research on the use of the PCL: YV with ethnic minority youths given its increasing influence on legal and correctional decision making, in addition to concerns over extending the construct of psychopathy downward to youth.

In a timely response to the lack of clear information on how well the PCL: YV can be generalised to adolescent females, Strand and colleagues explore the relationship between psychopathic traits and behavioural and emotional functioning in 80 Australian young offenders. The pattern of correlations observed between the PCL: YV facet scores and psychosocial variables showed differential associations across gender, suggesting that while the measure appears to assessing core psychopathic traits in young men, in young women, it might classify behaviours that are more correlated with symptoms of ADHD. The authors suggest that this area requires more study and that the PCL: YV should be used with caution when evaluating female youths.

The third paper by Krokoszinski and Hosser investigates emotion regulation processes in an interpersonal lying experiment, with the aim of examining whether fraudsters have well-functioning emotion regulation strategies or show a lack of emotional processes when deceiving someone face-to-face. Spontaneous deceptive responses were assumed to require participants to use cognitive reappraisal strategies in order to create the intention to deceive the interrogator, and to suppress emotionally driven physical behaviour when being confronted with the interrogator face-to-face. The alpha activity in the left dlPFC was used as an index for antecedent- and response-focused emotion regulation processes. The results suggest that fraudsters are better at emotion regulation while deceiving their opponents (person that was deceived) than violent offenders. The authors suggest that their results are in favour of the theory that fraudsters acquire well-functioning emotion regulation strategies for betraying people that prevent them from experiencing negative emotional responses, which might be attributable to long-lasting effects of cognitive reappraisal.

The final paper (Shagufta and colleagues) provides a comprehensive examination of the factor structure, reliability, and incremental validity of the Urdu version of the Measure of Criminal Social Identity (MCSI; Boduszek et al., 2012) in a sample of 315 incarcerated youth in Pakistan. Results indicate that a three factor model provides a better fit to the data than the alternative one, two, and bi-factor models tested. The reliability of the scale was established using composite reliability. Furthermore, structural equation modelling reveals that the three MCSI factors (cognitive centrality, in-group affect, and in-group ties) are differentially related with external variables (age and criminal friend index), indicating that the MCSI measures substantially different domains. Consequently, the results add valuable evidence as to the cross-cultural applicability of the MCSI.

We hope that you find the papers in this issue interesting. If you would like to contribute to the coming issues of JCP, you can find instructions on how to do so in our author guidelines at http://emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id=jcp

References

Boduszek, D., Adamson, G., Shevlin, M. and Hyland, P. (2012), “Development and validation of a measure of criminal social identity within a sample of polish recidivistic prisoners”, Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, Vol. 22 No. 5, pp. 315-24

Forth, A.E., Kosson, D.S. and Hare, R.D. (2003), “The Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version”, Multi Health Systems, Toronto

Further reading

Forth, A.E. and Kosson, D.S. (2003), “The Hare PCL: YV”, Multi-Health Systems, Toronto