Clarifying the Associations between Psychopathy and Attachment in Adult Non-Institutionalised Samples

Abstract

Psychopathy is a personality construct characterised by a range of destructive and disruptive interpersonal behaviours, however, there is limited information regarding how this construct relates to behaviour within intimate social relationships. One theory which could be useful in understanding not only the interpersonal processes of psychopathy, but potentially its etiology, is attachment theory. While a small literature regarding the association between psychopathy and attachment has been developed in recent years, there have been a number of discrepancies between studies and a number of areas of attachment theory left unexplored. Across a series of studies we investigated the associations between psychopathy and general attachment styles, attachment styles in specific normative relationships (e.g., mother, father, romantic partner and friends), and the actual presence of attachment bonds in large, adult, non-institutionalised samples using self-report measures. In our results, we demonstrated that there are consistent associations between individual differences in attachment styles and psychopathy, which tend to differ depending on the attachment dimension, component of psychopathy or specific attachment relationship under consideration. We also found deficits in the presence of attachment bonds associated with psychopathy, as indicated by reports of less attachment behaviour within one’s intimate social network, smaller intimate social network size and differences in social network composition. While this finding is consistent with theoretical descriptions of psychopathy, the effect sizes were small. Overall, our results are supportive of the application of attachment theory to understand the interpersonal processes of psychopathy and provide preliminary support for further consideration of attachment theory in psychopathy’s etiology. Given that we only found limited deficits regarding the capacity to form an attachment bond, taken together, our results suggest that it may be more important to examine the quality of bonds formed in psychopathic individuals rather than the mere presence or absence of bonds.