Psychopathy causes a great burden for both the patient, his or her caregivers and for the rest of society. Secondary psychopathy seems to be environment-related and secondary psychopaths may...Show morePsychopathy causes a great burden for both the patient, his or her caregivers and for the rest of society. Secondary psychopathy seems to be environment-related and secondary psychopaths may therefore benefit from treatment. An important topic of psychopathy research is to examine what causes the development of secondary psychopathy in children. The prevalence of personality disorders is higher in ethnic minority groups within Western Europe. A possible explanation for the increased risk of personality disorders in ethnic minority groups is lower self-esteem, which can be caused by the experience of being isolated from a group. This study focused on the relationship between implicit and explicit self-esteem and secondary psychopathic traits in adolescents between 12 and 17 years and the effect of ethnicity on this relationship. Questionnaires were used to measure psychopathic traits and explicit self-esteem, respectively by the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. Implicit self-esteem was determined with the aid of a computer task, the Implicit Association Task Self-Esteem, in which the reaction time was measured. As predicted, low self-esteem in Moroccan youth was correlated with higher levels of psychopathic traits and vice versa, which might be explained by the social-defeat model. On the contrary, this relationship wasn’t found for native Dutch adolescents. There seems to be no effect of social defeat for native Dutch adolescents. The ethnic differences in the relationship between self-esteem and psychopathic traits could not be explained by differences in socio-economic background. These results demonstrate that self-esteem is important in predicting secondary psychopathic traits in Moroccan youth. The social-defeat model gives an explanation for this relationship. In the future preventive programs should focus on increasing self-esteem, especially among ethnic minority groups, to reduce the chance of developing secondary psychopathic traits and psychopathy.Show less
