Journal of Behavioral Assessment, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1980 Psychopathy and Structure of Primary Mental Abilities Robert D. Hare, 1 Janice Frazelle, ! Jutka Bus, 2 and Jeffrey W. Jutai 1 Accepted February 2, 1980 The Comprehensive Ability Battery (CAB) was used to assess 18 primary mental abilities in 53 white, male prison inmates for whom highly reliable ratings of psychopathy were available. None of the correlations between ratings of psy- chopathy and scores on the CAB tests was significant, and the overall pattern or structure of abilities was the same for inmates with low and high ratings of psychopathy. The possibility is raised that the personality characteristics of psy- chopaths make them appear to be brighter and more creative than they actually are. Compared with norms for male high school students, the inmates as a group generally performed well, falling near the 50th percentile on 11 of the tests. The inmates performed significantly better than the normative sample on tests of verbal ability, esthetic judgment, aiming, and representational drawing, and significantly worse on tests of ideational fluency, spontaneous flexibility, and word fluency. KEY WORDS: psychopathy; antisocial personality disorder; intelligence; primary mental abilities; structure of intellectual functions. INTRODUCTION A considerable amount of empirical evidence indicates that psychopathy is associated with at least an average level of general intelligence. Much of this This research was supported by Grant MT-4511 from the Medical Research Council of Canada. 1Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, V6T lW5. 2Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, V6T lW5. 77 0164-0305/80/0600-0077 $03.00/0 © 1980 Plenum~Publishin9 Corporation