Dark Triad Personality Traits and Empathy as Explanatory Factors in Pathways from Cumulative Childhood Trauma to Intimate Partner Violence Perpetration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To better understand the underlying mechanisms of intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration, this study examined the direct and sequential indirect associations between the cumulative childhood interpersonal trauma (CCT), Dark Triad personality traits, empathy skills, and IPV perpetration (physical, psychological, sexual, and coercive control) among men entering treatment for IPV-related issues. In a cross-sectional survey, a sample of 1418 Canadian men was recruited through a unique partnership with community organizations specializing in IPV treatment. Participants completed self-report questionnaires online, which assessed CCT, personality, empathy, and perpetrated IPV. A path analysis model was conducted to test direct and indirect associations. Results revealed that higher CCT in men was associated with higher IPV perpetration (psychological, coercive control) sequentially through all three personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy), and more contradictory emotions (affective dissonance) to those of others. Other direct (i.e. CCT-higher psychological IPV) and indirect (e.g. CCT-more psychopathy-higher physical IPV) associations were also observed and discussed. Findings provide valuable insights into intervention targets to reduce and prevent IPV perpetration. Specifically, the high prevalence of CCT among IPV perpetrators underscores the need to incorporate this factor in clinical assessments. Practitioners are encouraged to target the contradictory emotional responses of perpetrators toward others, as dissonant empathy plays a significant role in the risk of IPV perpetration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".