Increasing the Utility of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality–Lexical Rating Scale (CAPP-LRS): Instrument Adaptation and Simplification

Abstract

The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality–Lexical Rating Scale (CAPP-LRS) is a self-report instrument designed to index psychopathy according to the CAPP psychopathy framework. Developed with the expressed goal of advancing the state of knowledge regarding the specific features of psychopathy, the CAPP model and associated instruments have garnered increasing attention and support in the field. Despite the conceptual strength of the CAPP model, the advanced lexical structure of its primary research tool (the CAPP-LRS) has led researchers to question the utility of the instrument for use with some populations of interest (e.g., forensic/correctional and adolescent/young adult samples). The aim of the present work was to address this issue by creating a lexically simplified, though functionally equivalent, version of the CAPP-LRS to increase accessibility to critically relevant populations. A set of two studies (N = 602) describes the adaptation protocol and the initial validation of the modified instrument.