Does the RMH Explain Psychopathic Violence?
My own research has focused on expanding the response modulation hypothesis (RMH) in two ways. First, I have attempted to use the RMH to explain psychopathic violence.Second, I have tested the generalizability of the RMH across populations. In 2005 I published (with my colleagues Ralph Serin, Daniel Bolt, and Joseph Newman) “Hostile attributions in incarcerated adult male offenders: An exploration of two pathways” in the journal Aggressive Behavior. I presented my replication of the study, entitled “Hostile attributions and psychopathy: Replication and extension of a dual pathway model” this past spring at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy. Both studies examined the relationship between psychopathy and crime in a sample of male offenders utilizing a model proposed by Crick & Dodge (1994) that highlights the role of hostile attribution biases in aggression. The Hostile Attribution Bias (HAB) is a tendency to interpret the ambiguous, provocative be
