Examining the Caring-Uncaring Emotional (CUE) Inventory as a Measure of Affective, Callous-Unemotional Psychopathy Traits in a Community Sample of Adults

Abstract

Affective-interpersonal features such as callousness, meanness, or interpersonal antagonism, are regarded as essential to psychopathy. It has been proposed that assessment of the affective dimension of psychopathy may be relevant for risk assessment purposes and for intervention and treatment purposes. It may be constructive to have available brief measures of the affective dimension of psychopathy in both youth and adult populations. The current study represents a second validation study of a new, brief, self-report measure of the affective dimension of psychopathy in adults and potentially in adolescents. A study of the Caring-Uncaring Emotional (CUE) Inventory was conducted with 121 men and women recruited from a community sample. The CUE was found to have high internal consistency reliability (α = .93), and was found to have high correlations with multiple subscale measures of callous affect from established psychopathy measures developed for adults and for youths. The CUE was found to have a high, inverse association with a measure of empathy. The CUE also was found to have a moderate, positive association with a measure of Antisocial Intent. An Exploratory Factor Analysis suggested a three-factor solution, with the first factor accounting for 36.3% of the variance in scores, with high to very high loadings on 15 items. The first factor appeared to represent a robust measure of callousness in adults in a community sample. The second and third factors may tap into lack of close attachment and indifference/emotional detachment as conceptualized in other psychopathy measures. Further study of the CUE is needed to better clarify the latent structure of this scale. The CUE should be further studied for its relationships with other psychopathy measures and personality and behavioral variables. The strong associations between the CUE and two youth psychopathy measures in the current study which included young adults warrants its study in youth samples, including juvenile offenders.