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. 2018 Nov;46(8):1643-1649.
doi: 10.1007/s10802-018-0411-0.

Socioeconomic Status and Psychopathic Traits in a Community Sample of Youth

Wendy Zwaanswijk  1 , Mitch van Geel  2 , Paul Vedder  2
Affiliations

Socioeconomic Status and Psychopathic Traits in a Community Sample of Youth

Wendy Zwaanswijk et al. J Abnorm Child Psychol. 2018 Nov.

Abstract

The current study aims to address socioeconomic status (SES) as a moderating variable between psychopathic traits and conduct problems in a sample of 2432 Dutch adolescents (Mage = 14.50 years, SD = 1.67, 56% male). Both family and neighborhood SES were measured, with income as a proxy for the level of SES. There were small but significant positive correlations between the behavioral and interpersonal dimensions of psychopathy and family SES, a small but significant negative correlation between the affective dimension and neighborhood SES, and a small and significant positive correlation between neighborhood SES and the behavioral dimension of psychopathy. Results further showed that the relations between youth psychopathic traits were moderated by neither family SES nor neighborhood SES. The results suggest that the relations between psychopathic traits and conduct problems are equally strong for lower and higher SES youth. Taken together, these findings warrant the conclusions that SES does not play a role as a moderator in the relation between psychopathy and conduct problems.

Keywords: Conduct problems; Family SES; Neighborhood SES; Psychopathic traits; Socioeconomic status.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

All research procedures involving human participants were approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Institute of Education and Child Studies at Leiden University, in accordance with the standards laid down in the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all participating students.

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