SHORT REPORTS Response Perseveration in Psychopathic Women

Recent attempts to validate the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R; R. D. Hare, 1991) as a measure of psychopathy in female offenders have been limited by a failure to examine laboratory correlates of the syndrome. We assessed 112 incarcerated women by using the PCL-R and examined their performance on a card perseveration task that has been used to demonstrate response perseveration in psychopathic men. Contrary to prediction, psychopathic women did not perseverate responding when the PCL-R was used either dimensionally or categorically. The authors discuss the implications of the results for the PCL-R and for female psychopathy more generally. Psychopathy is a syndrome characterized by affective, interper-sonal, and behavioral deficits (Cleckley, 1976; Hare, 1991). Psy-chopathic individuals are defined according to their inability to form emotional bonds with others, their callous, self-serving atti-tudes, and their impulsive, often antisocial behaviors. The intro-duction of Hare's (1991) Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R), currently considered the state-of-the-art measure of the syndrome (Fulero, 1995) in Caucasian men, has facilitated sys-tematic investigation of the etiology, course, and symptomotology of the syndrome (see Hare, 1996). Recently, researchers have begun to examine these correlates of PCL-R psychopathy in diverse samples, including adolescents (e.g., Brandt, Kennedy