Cross-cultural generalizability of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP) in South Korea

The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP; Cooke, Hart, Logan, & Michie, 2013) is a new lexically-based conceptual model of psychopathy that has potential clinical utility. The main purpose of the current research was to investigate the generalizability of the CAPP conceptual model in South Korea. In Study 1, I conducted a study in which experts and lay people in South Korea were asked to rate the prototypicality of symptoms of psychopathy using a Korean language translation of the CAPP model (K-CAPP). The results indicated that, consistent with past research in other countries, Korean experts and lay people on average rated K-CAPP symptoms as being moderately to highly prototypical of psychopathy, and also more prototypical of psychopathy on average than symptoms theoretically unrelated to psychopathy. The prototypicality ratings for K-CAPP symptoms made by Korean experts and lay people were similar to each other, as well as to those made by experts and lay people using the CAPP in other countries. In Study 2, I evaluated the reliability and concurrent validity of expert ratings of psychopathy made using a Korean translation of a CAPP-based clinical measure, CAPP-Institutional Rating Scale (K-CAPP-IRS), in a sample of correctional offenders in South Korea. Reliability analyses based on simple intraclass correlations indicated very high (> .80) interrater reliability for almost all the K-CAPP-IRS symptom, domain, and total ratings. But a more sophisticated examination using a Generalizability Theory framework, with a Persons (89 offenders) x Raters (3 experts) x Occasions (2 occasions, three-month interval) x Items (33 K-CAPP-IRS symptoms) design, revealed complex but substantial interactions involving Raters; however, the impact of these interactions was mitigated when K-CAPP-IRS ratings were made by increasing the number of Raters, as opposed to Occasions. Concurrent validity analyses that K-CAPP-IRS total scores were correlated highly with total scores on the Korean translation of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (Cho & Lee, 2008), r = .647; and moderately with total scores on the Korean translation of the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised (Park & Lee, 2013), r = .350. Overall, the results of Studies 1 and 2 indicate that the concept of psychopathy, as captured by the CAPP concept map, appears to be cross-culturally valid in South Korea.