Victim Empathy, Social Self-Esteem, and Psychopathy in Rapists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to compare the responses of 27 incarcerated rapists and 27 incarcerated nonsexual offenders using the Rapist Empathy Measure (targeting victim specific empathy deficits) and to examine the relationship between empathy with self-esteem and psychopathy for both groups. The Social Self-Esteem Inventory was used as a measure of perceived social competence and the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991) was used as a measure of psychopathy. All participants completed the two self-report questionnaires on empathy and self-esteem; in addition, the rapists were required to complete an extra section of the empathy measure that assessed their empathic responses to their own victims. Demographic information and psychopathy scores were obtained by reviewing institutional files. When psychopathy scores were not available, subjects participated in a semi-structured interview and were scored on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised by the researcher. Rapists demonstrated more empathy than the nonsexual offenders toward women in general and the same degree of empathy as the nonsexual offenders toward a woman who had been a victim of a sexual assault by another male. Of particular importance were the within-group comparisons across victim type for the rapists which revealed significant empathy deficits toward their own victim(s). Interestingly, no differences were found between the rapists and nonsexual offenders in terms of self-esteem and psychopathy, and neither self-esteem nor psychopathy significantly predicted empathy for either group. It was concluded from the present study that rapists may suppress empathy primarily toward their own victim rather than suffer from a generalized empathy deficit. It is suggested that empathy deficits in rapists might better be construed as cognitive distortions specific to their victims and should be addressed in that manner in treatment.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".