While conceptualization of psychopathy has evolved, so too has the public's relationship with psychology changed. Concurrently, portrayal of psychopaths has made several shifts, both through nonfiction sources and in popular film and television. Psychopathic villains of the mid-20th century have made space for a growing cast of protagonist psychopaths. This study examined whether a relationship existed between exposure to fictional psychopaths and how lay individuals conceptualize psychopathy. Specifically, this study explored conceptualization differences based on exposure to antagonist versus protagonist fictional psychopaths. Surveyed community participants supported earlier research suggesting mixed misunderstanding of psychopathy. Additionally, higher exposure to protagonist psychopaths was associated with higher endorsement of flattering distractor traits, reflecting a kind of romanticized psychopathy. These findings have legal, practical, and ethical implications, including the potential for biased jurors, confounded research about psychopathy's labeling effect, and questions about how psychologists should respond on an individual and systemic level.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 8. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 22 July 2023.
All research outputs
#6,364,053
of 34,372,222 outputs
Outputs from Journal of Forensic Sciences (Blackwell Publishing Limited)
#728
of 4,690 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#78,866
of 363,020 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Journal of Forensic Sciences (Blackwell Publishing Limited)
#15
of 97 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,372,222 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 81st percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 4,690 research outputs from this source. They typically receive more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 8.1. This one has done well, scoring higher than 84% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 363,020 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 78% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 97 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 84% of its contemporaries.
