A Comparison of the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory (YPI)-Triarchic Scales and the YPI in a Sample of Justice-Involved Youth

The Triarchic model (Patrick, Fowles, & Krueger, 2009) posits that psychopathy consists of three elements: Boldness, Meanness, and Disinhibition. Drislane et al. (2015) recently derived scales from the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory (YPI; Andershed, Kerr, Stattin, & Levander, 2002) to assess these traits. The initial validation efforts appeared promising, but researchers have yet to evaluate these scales among justice-involved youth. The current study examines the validity of the YPI-Triarchic scales in an archival sample of 928 male adolescent offenders and tests whether the new scales provide information incremental to the original YPI. The YPI-Triarchic scales were strongly correlated with original YPI scales (rs = .56–.96), and some associations were contrary to predictions and previous findings about the Triarchic model (e.g., YPI-Boldness was not inversely related to symptomatology). Thus, caution is warranted when attempting to study the Triarchic model with the YPI-Triarchic scales.