Implicit associations as a method for detection of violence and psychopathy.

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by interpersonal, affective, behavioral and life-style traits. There is a relationship between psychopathy and violent behavior but few studies assess the tendency toward violence in psychopaths by implicit association methods like the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The violent-IAT was developed to assess the cognitive distortions about violence of 195 male inmates according to their psychopathy level and the offense committed, in addition, the performance in the test according to the factor level 1 and 2 of psychopathy was assessed. The results showed that psychopath-violent inmates had cognitive distortions about violence; and those with high factor 2 of psychopathy level inmates had a tendency toward violence. The discussion focused in the relationship between both psychopathy factors and violent behavior; and the importance to have reliable, objective and brief instruments like violent-IAT to measure the tendency toward violent behavior. The semi-structured interviews need a long time and a specialized training to assess the psychopathy level. The potential to detect subjects in high risk of committing extreme violent offenses by violent-IAT, that only need 15 minutes and gives an automatic-scored, is also discussed.