Abstract
Sexual sadism and psychopathy have been linked theoretically, clinically, and empirically to violence. Whereas evidence suggests that sadists derive sexual gratification from the physical and emotional suffering of others, psychopaths are violent for varied reasons: failing to attend to another’s distress cues, overreacting to perceived aggression, or as a means to an external goal. Despite this overlap of predominantly predatory violence displayed by both sadists and psychopaths, few studies have sought to explore the interface of the two constructs, and even fewer have sought to conceptualize the covariation of violence in each. Those studies that have explored the covariation have suffered from limited assessments of violence, poorly operationalized definitions of sadism, and failure to examine all four Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) facets of psychopathy. The current research sought to remedy these problems by a) using detailed analyses of crime behaviors to generate dependent measures of sexual and non-sexual\r violence, b) using well-defined, validated measures of sadism, and c) considering all four psychopathy facets. Two independent samples of 314 and 599 adult, male sex offenders were assessed using a multimethod approach with both ratings from archival records and administration of a computerized self-report inventory, the Multidimensional Inventory of Development, Sex, and Aggression (the MIDSA). Exploratory factor analyses of detailed crime scene descriptions yielded three consistent sexual crime behavior factors:\r Violence Severity, Sexual Control, and Sexual Behavior. Hierarchical multiple\r regressions were performed with sadism and the PCL-R facets as predictors and with general violence and the sexual crime behavior factors as outcomes. As hypothesized, the PCL-R facets collectively predicted both the Violence Severity factor and general violence, and sadism predicted general violence, the Violence Severity factor, and the Sexual Control factor. Sadism and psychopathy overlapped, but the two constructs were not co-extensive and appeared to capture different aspects of aggression.