an examination of the factor structure of the psychopathy checklist

may in fact be due to the nature of these items. Specifically, in order for these
characteristics to influence these youths’ use of instrumental violence they would have
to recognize prior to the initiation of violence that they themselves would not suffer
emotional consequences as a result of their actions. Indeed, to engage in the cold-
blooded nature of instrumentally motivated aggressive acts, these offenders would need
to be cognizant of the fact that they are incapable of taking their victims perspective and
are unable to experience the resulting negative affect that other nonpsychopathic youth
would likely experience. Conversely, provided that affective deficits and impaired
empathic responses would logically be related to the callous treatment of others, this
nonsignificant finding may be related to a lack of power or an artifact of restricted range.
Although the current study included a large sample of female youth, the use of
instrumental violence among these females was relatively small compared to studies
with males, as mentioned earlier in this section. In fact, since the entire sample
consisted of female youth offenders, who are a relatively homogenous group, the range
of scores on the instrumentality measures and the PCL:YV may have been restricted
leading to attenuation of the correlation between these two variables. It would be
beneficial to examine this relationship among a sample that contains a larger
percentage of female psychopaths who are using instrumental violence.
The current study’s findings, in combination with other research on female
psychopathy, may also suggest that the PCL measures may not be sufficiently sensitive
in detecting the traits that are associated with female psychopathy, and which may
serve to uniquely predispose females to aggressive and violent behaviour (Odgers,
Moretti, & Reppucci, 2005; Verona & Vitale, 2006). In fact, a unitary “all-encompassing”
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