Date of Award

August 2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Alan King

Abstract

Sexual perpetration is a pervasive public health concern with various theoretical models used to account for the developmental trajectory of this form of behavior. Personality traits have been incorporated into both etiologic and violence risk assessment predictive models. Contemporary personality inventories have not been examined extensively as risk indicators of self-reported sexual aggressiveness. The current study examined links between self-reported sexual perpetration and selected scales from the Millon® Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI®-IV) and Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5). Data from an initial pool of respondents (N = 1,408) was segregated after protocol interpretability exclusions into men who self-reported past sexual perpetration (PID-5, n = 97; MCMI®-IV, n = 59) and normative controls without sexual perpetration histories (PID-5, n = 168; MCMI®-IV, n = 71). PID-5 scores for callousness, grandiosity, deceitfulness, manipulativeness, antagonism, and disinhibition were all higher for respondents in the perpetrator group than for those in the non-perpetrator group. MCMI®-IV scores for narcissism and sadism were consistently higher amongst individuals in the perpetration group. Most of these relationships remained even after control of variance associated with self-reported physical aggressiveness. ROC analyses were conducted on significant risk indicator raw scores. Cut score thresholds were derived from the apex of each ROC curve to maximize the ratio of true to false positives in classification predictions. Cut scores were used in combined dimensional logistic regressions for optimized categorical thresholds (ROC derived) with age as a covariate. Callousness, disinhibition, and sadistic scores were found to account for unshared variance in the final sexual aggression model. These findings may contribute to the etiologic conceptualization of sexual perpetration as well as risk assessment and treatment for individuals who endorse sexual perpetration.

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