Athar et al. (see record 2027-45295-001) offer a critique of the Psychopathic Boldness Scale (see record 2025-96918-001), highlighting what they argue are both conceptual and empirical limitations of this new operationalization of the triarchic model's construct of boldness. In this reply, we demonstrate that their theoretical claims are based on a mischaracterization of the triarchic model, in which they purport that boldness should be orthogonal to the triarchic construct of meanness. We also provide additional empirical analyses suggesting that Athar et al. are incorrect in their characterization of the extent to which the correlates of the Psychopathic Boldness Scale initially described by Marcus et al. (2025) suggest that it is a de facto operationalization of meanness (rather than boldness). We conclude with suggestions for additional research with the Psychopathic Boldness Scale that would better inform our understanding of the nomological network of this new scale, such as examining correlations with constructs associated with narcissism and with psychophysiological measures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Higher levels of everyday sadism are associated with more positive emotional responses to viewing violent images, playing violent video games, and watching combative/violent sports. This study investigated whether the association between everyday sadism and positive ratings of images depicting suffering would be stronger when participants believed the images were real than when they believed they were fake. A total of 235 college students accessed this study online and were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: half of the participants were informed that the images were real, while the other half were told that the images were fake. Participants controlled how long they viewed the images and were asked to rate how pleasurable each image was. Participants then completed self-report measures to assess everyday sadism. There was an association between everyday sadism and both selected viewing time and ratings of images depicting suffering. These associations remained significant even after controlling for the dark triad traits. There were no effects of condition on the ratings of images depicting suffering, nor a significant interaction between everyday sadism and condition on the pleasure ratings of such images. Higher levels of everyday sadism were positively associated with a preference to view images depicting suffering, even when controlling for the dark triad traits. This association was not influenced by the perceived reality of such images.

For over 60 years, the American Psychological Association (APA) has submitted amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs with the aim of informing the courts about relevant scientific findings that may otherwise be absent from, or misrepresented in, the trial records of court cases. To achieve this aim, it is important that the summarized information accurately reflects the relevant scientific literature. The present study investigated the accuracy of the citations to empirical research in the 16 most recent APA amicus briefs by comparing the accuracy of the citing claims within these briefs to the original claims made in the cited articles. Case topics included false confessions, affirmative action, eyewitness testimony, child welfare, child custody, abortion, gender-affirming care, and sexual orientation change efforts. These briefs yielded 507 citations to empirical studies that were coded by pairs of independent coders. Results indicated that 72.8% of citations were accurate, 20.3% were somewhat accurate, and 6.9% were inaccurate. APA amicus briefs have been cited in a number of landmark rulings and have the potential to enhance the public welfare and the reputation of psychological science. It is, however, imperative that APA works to minimize miscitations in these briefs. We offer a set of recommendations for ways to reduce the number of miscitations in APA amicus briefs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

We examined the associations that the trait of spitefulness had with the benign and malicious forms of dispositional envy as well as the role that justice sensitivity played in these associations. In Study 1 (N = 901 undergraduate students), trait spitefulness was positively associated with malicious envy even when controlling for basic personality dimensions, whereas it was not associated with benign envy. In Study 2 (N = 356 undergraduate students) and Study 3 (N = 748 community members), the positive association that spitefulness had with malicious envy was mediated by the tendency to view oneself as a victim of injustice as well as a lack of concern about whether one treats others in a fair and just manner. Studies 2 and 3 also revealed that spitefulness had an unexpected indirect association with benign envy through the tendency to view oneself as a victim. Taken together, these results suggest that the connection between spitefulness and dispositional envy - especially the malicious form of envy - may be due, at least in part, to a self-centered view of fairness that is focused on one's own welfare combined with a disregard for whether others are treated in a fair or just manner.

In this reply to commentaries, we argue that amicus briefs should identify when findings are based on simulation studies, clarify that we did not propose that American Psychological Association amicus briefs must be perfect, and refute notions that our coding was opaque or that following legal (i.e., Bluebook) style absolves psychologists from following American Psychological Association standards. We agree with the commentary by Cobb et al. (2025) that citation inaccuracies are a threat to our discipline's integrity that can, and should, be reduced. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The triarchic model posits that boldness, meanness, and disinhibition comprise psychopathy. Critics have questioned whether boldness is essential to psychopathy because boldness is minimally related to meanness and disinhibition and is associated with positive outcomes such as psychological health. The aim of the present study was to develop a Psychopathic Boldness Scale (PBS) that would be more closely associated with the other components of the triarchic model and would be associated with antisocial behaviors and maladaptive traits. Data from two college student samples (a test development sample, N = 204 [79% female, 72% White], and a replication sample, N = 426 [81.5% female, 64% White]) and an online male validation sample (N = 125, 55% White) were used to select items and examine the factor structure, internal consistency reliability, item functioning, and convergent and discriminant validity of this scale. The PBS had a three-factor (higher order) structure in which the three factors (fearlessness, social potency, carefree rule breaking) were highly intercorrelated, justifying the use of a total score. The PBS was internally consistent, and all 21 items functioned well. The PBS was positively correlated with measures of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition. The PBS was positively associated with antisocial behavior, Machiavellianism, sensation seeking, fearlessness, and behavioral activation. It was negatively associated with agreeableness, conscientiousness, honesty-humility, altruism, and behavioral inhibition. Although additional research with diverse samples and biobehavioral correlates of boldness is needed, the PBS appears to be a promising measure that may address some of the criticisms of boldness as a component of psychopathy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The present study applied taxometric analyses to the Washington Assessment of Risks and Needs of Students (WARNS)—an instrument designed to assess multiple domains of functioning related to justice system involvement arising from school disengagement—a trajectory referred to as the school to prison pipeline. Previous taxometric studies of constructs related to juvenile justice system involvement found dimensional rather than taxonic (dichotomous) latent structures. Participants were 5008 students from 89 Washington school districts who completed the WARNS as part of standard educational practices. The results were uniformly consistent with a dimensional latent structure. Also supporting a dimensional latent structure, dichotomized WARNS scores were significantly less strongly associated with student arrests, school suspensions, and school skip days than continuous WARNS scores. These findings support the dimensionality of risk and needs and have implications for assessments undertaken to improve school and social outcomes for at-risk youth.

Researchers who conduct studies comparing the efficacy of two treatments often find that their preferred treatment outperforms the comparison treatment. This finding has been labelled the allegiance association. Although this association is robust, it is unclear whether it reflects an allegiance bias on the part of the researchers or whether it is noncausal, with researchers being allied to the more effective treatments. This study applied a quasi-experimental method proposed by a previous study to 19 pairs of treatment comparison studies. Each member of a pair had used the same two psychotherapies to treat clients with the same disorder, but the researchers in each of the two studies had opposing allegiances. If the authors of one study in the pair concluded that their preferred treatment was superior and the authors of the other study concluded that their preferred treatment was superior or that the two treatments were equivalent, these patterns would suggest allegiance bias. In 10 of the 19 pairs, the patterns were consistent with the operation of an allegiance bias, indicating that although allegiance biases are not inevitable, they are ubiquitous. Practitioners and other psychotherapy research consumers should use caution when interpreting the findings from treatment comparison studies.

Machiavellian individuals are callous, manipulative, and misanthropic, and they are also strategic and capable of delaying gratification. Many commonly used measures of Machiavellianism focus on the antagonistic aspects of Machiavellianism and devote few items to the strategic aspects of this construct. Because the HEXACO framework includes an Honesty-Humility factor, it may be especially capable of characterizing the full range of Machiavellian characteristics. The current study used a consensus-rating approach to create Machiavellianism scales using items from the HEXACO-100. This approach yielded two HEXACO-Machiavellianism scales that were labeled HEXACO-Manipulative and HEXACO-Disciplined. Data from five community and college student samples were used to examine the internal consistency and validity of these HEXACO-Machiavellianism scales. The scales demonstrated acceptable internal consistency and displayed promising convergent and discriminant validity with criterion variables, including other Machiavellianism scales. The HEXACO-Manipulative and HEXACO-Disciplined scales were negatively correlated, suggesting that Machiavellianism may be better understood as an emergent trait.

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and the manic and hypomanic episodes found in the bipolar disorders are characterized by grandiosity. It is possible that this shared grandiosity is a 'homologous structure' or reflects a superficial similarity between two disparate conditions. It is, however, possible that NPD and the bipolar disorders are more closely related than implied by their segregation into the separate superordinate categories of personality disorders and mood disorders. Whereas narcissism is considered to be a life-course, stable trait and the bipolar disorders are characterized by episodes of mania and depression, there is considerable research indicating that narcissism may be linked to mood instability (including depression) and bipolar disorder may have a pervasive personality component (i.e., hypomanic personality). Utilizing dimensional models of psychopathology, the current review examined the evidence linking narcissism and the bipolar disorders and suggests that considerable overlap may exist in the domains associated with reward-seeking, harm avoidance and social functioning.

Spitefulness is a personality trait characterized by an inclination to cause harm to others in a manner that also results in self-harm. Studies considering this trait have mostly been performed in individualistic cultures. Our aim was to adapt and accumulate statistical evidence for the Brazilian Portuguese version of the Spitefulness Scale (SS-BP), examining the functioning of the instrument in a collectivist culture. Study 1 adapted the instrument, investigated dimensionality, and examined item functioning and gender invariance in a sample of 766 participants (53.4% male) aged between 18 and 63 years old (M = 23.71; SD = 7.92). Study 2 examined the association of spitefulness with aversive and healthy personality traits (i.e., the dark triad, honesty-humility, emotionality, extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness [HEXACO], antagonism, and disinhibition) in a sample of 288 individuals (mostly women 84.7%) between 18 and 71 years old (M = 41.82; SD = 13.04). Similar to the original instrument, the SS-BP was unidimensional and there was measurement invariance with respect to gender. Men were more spiteful than women. Spitefulness yielded large correlations with psychopathy, deceitfulness, and irresponsibility. The SS-BP appears to present adequate psychometric properties for Brazilian samples. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Inconsistent responding poses a particular risk to self-report data and is a common phenomenon in undergraduate and community subject pools. The HEXACO-100 personality inventory (Lee & Ashton, 2018) lacks internal validity scales that could be used to identify inconsistent responding. To address this need, the present study developed a HEXACO Inconsistent Responding Test (HIRT). Highly correlated and conceptually overlapping HEXACO-100 item pairs were identified from a derivation sample and cross-validated by comparing real data to randomly generated protocols. The HIRT was highly accurate at identifying both randomly generated and half-randomly generated protocols. HIRT scores exhibited significant correlations with other inconsistency measures (i.e., the Triarchic Assessment Procedure for Inconsistent Responding and the HEXACO's Inter-item Standard Deviation) and were as effective as these other measures at differentiating between consistent and inconsistent responders. This preliminary validation of the HIRT provides strong evidence of its ability to improve the quality of data gathered with the HEXACO-100, which may be especially useful for researchers hoping to utilize the measure in clinically relevant research and applications. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The narcissistic admiration and rivalry concept (NARC) model of grandiose narcissism posits that striving for uniqueness, grandiose fantasies, and charmingness define narcissistic admiration, whereas striving for supremacy, devaluation, and aggressiveness define narcissistic rivalry. Given these complex interrelationships, we explored the structure of grandiose narcissism using the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire (NARQ) and Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) via network analysis in four separate samples which allowed us to assess the extent to which these networks replicated across these samples (total N = 3,868). Overall, grandiose cognitions from the NARQ emerged as a highly central node in each network, providing compound evidence for its replicability and generalizability as an important feature of grandiose narcissism within the NARC model. Charmingness from the NARQ emerged as a central node throughout Samples 1, 2, and 3, with strong connections to features of narcissistic admiration and narcissistic rivalry (e.g., grandiose fantasies and aggressiveness), but was less central in Sample 4. To our knowledge, this is the first research to examine the replicability of the network structure of grandiose narcissism across various samples. These findings add to an increasingly important dialogue regarding replicability in psychological network science.

This study investigated item and scale functioning in the triarchic psychopathy measure (TriPM) using an item response theory (IRT) analysis. TriPM data collected from 937 (410 men and 527 women) college students and community members were analyzed. A graded response model was utilized to analyze the items comprising the TriPM's three scales. Exploratory factor analyses (EFAs) supported the unidimensionality of the Disinhibition and Meanness scales, whereas Boldness was best represented by two domains. Each TriPM scale was found to include some items that had limited ability to differentiate between respondents possessing varying levels of the trait being measured. Across all scales, 34 items (61%) yielded evidence of significantly different responding between men and women possessing similar levels of the underlying trait, or differential item functioning (DIF). The scoring format (i.e., directly scored vs. reverse scored) also influenced item functioning, especially when the given scale included a large majority of one scoring type. Overall, the IRT and DIF results suggest that the TriPM effectively identifies disinhibition and meanness in individuals possessing high levels of those traits, and boldness at lower levels, but does not seem to identify these traits equally well in men and women. Possible revisions to the Boldness scale as well as ideas for addressing female and male DIF were provided. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Despite being well-researched, the conceptualization of psychopathy incites much debate within the field. Results from network analysis can inform these debates by graphically and quantitatively depicting the core characteristics of the construct of psychopathy. Existing network studies with Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) scores suggest the affective traits are most central to the construct of psychopathy, but more studies are needed. The current study examined network models developed using data from risk assessments of individuals convicted of a sex offense (N = 615). Findings corroborate some aspects of previous network studies in that affective features were most central to the construct and antisocial traits were least central, but there were instances of traits with notably higher centrality (e.g., Pathological Lying, Need for Stimulation, and Impulsivity) or lower centrality (e.g., Shallow Affect) than in prior research, suggesting that trait centrality may vary depending on the sample and evaluation context.

The social relations model (SRM) is powerful theoretical framework and statistical tool for studying interpersonal behavior and interpersonal perception in groups. Because the SRM can be used to analyze round-robin data in which each group member influences and is influenced by every other group member, it is an ideal framework for studying group dynamics. Despite these advantages, the SRM is underutilized in the group dynamics literature, with the journal Group Dynamics having only published five SRM articles in its 25-year history. This article reintroduces readers to the SRM, discusses many of the benefits to conducting SRM research, considers some of the challenges and impediments to conducting SRM research, and reviews the SRM studies that have been published in Group Dynamics.