Abstract
This chapter reviews literature on intersections of psychopathy, traumatic experiences, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and weighs evidence for putative causal models explaining these relationships. Existing research indicates that experiences of trauma vary with dimension of psychopathic traits, with impulsive-antisocial traits more consistently related to trauma histories, relative to interpersonal-affective traits. There is also evidence that the relationship between interpersonal-affective traits and trauma is more positively related in men than in women, though future work should investigate this possibility. Various models can help explain links between psychopathy and trauma, including those involving gene-environment correlations and interactions, modeling and learning, emotional blunting and instability, and traumatic brain injury (TBI). Though more research is needed, emotional blunting and emotional instability following a traumatic experience, and possibly as a consequence of TBI, are promising potential mechanisms for the development of interpersonal-affective and impulsive-antisocial psychopathic traits, respectively. Treatments targeting emotional dysregulation may be helpful for individuals who exhibit impulsive-antisocial traits and report experiencing trauma, as might assessment for TBI and treatment of post-concussive symptoms. Future work would benefit from investigating emotional blunting and instability as explanatory in the relationships between psychopathy and trauma, and the potential role of TBI and gender in these relationships.