Trauma, Stress, and Resilience Among Family Members of Individuals with Psychopathic Personality Disorder: A Scoping Review
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: It is important to note that research focusing on psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) has tended to focus on the person who exhibits psychopathic or antisocial features, and to date the role of the intimate partner and family member of a psychopath has not received much attention. The purpose of this scoping review is to outline and chart evidence on trauma and stress, burden, coping, family functioning and resilience among individuals who have close relationships with those characterized as having psychopathic traits or ASPD. Additionally, the review explores related literature from the personality disorder caregiver field to uncover ideas and scales that could be used in psychopathy specific studies.Methods: The review was conducted following the PRISMA-ScR and recent JBI guidelines that outline the steps used to build a Scoping review. The original search included records from the databases PubMed, PsycINFO, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, yielding 124 records of which 11 were considered for the original synthesis. In this revision, the following references were checked concurrently with PubMed, journal platforms, JBI resources and India journals independently of each other: methodological, psychopathy/relationship, caregiver, and Indian-context references. The present manuscript does not claim that the original 124/11 counts reflect the updated search (they do have been rerun of expanded database searches and updated prior to submission).Findings: Evidence of direct involvement is mainly focussed on intimate partners. Forth et al. (2022) examined 457 current and former partners recruited from online support groups and showed that higher levels of victimization, maladaptive coping, and higher psychopathy among partners was related to higher levels of PTSD and depression symptom severity. Systematic-review and meta-analytic findings from the last few years also suggest a relationship between psychopathy and IPSV, although this relationship is not uniform as to facets of psychopathy or types of violence. Evidence on children, parents, brothers and sisters and other family members is much more limited. Burden, loss, psychological distress, stigma, and family support needs are consistently found in families of caregivers next to those with a psychopathic diagnosis in all caregiver research, and there are models of measurement to do so, as well as models to intervene, but these do not necessarily directly apply to psychopathic-affected families.Conclusions: The evidence gap most clearly stated is the lack of studies; however, there is also the lack of family-role-specific, longitudinal, clinically grounded research. The results are presented as a conceptual model of a provisional nature that can be used to generate hypotheses and testable models, but not as an empirically established causal model. Future research should consider longitudinal family research designs, research methods that validate measures, culturally diverse samples, child and parent outcome measures, and ethically designed interventions.
Author: Dr Sayonee, Bose
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7225730469
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