Abstract:

Psychopathy, characterized by egocentricity, deceptiveness, impulsiveness, lack of empathy and lack of guilt, was defined as a personality disorder with a cluster of interpersonal, affective, behavioral and antisocial traits. Previous studies on psychopathy with particular emphasis on the physiological mechanisms have shown that psychopathy was highly hereditary. However, more and more studies highlighted the effect of family factors on the psychopathy. These factors mainly include: prenatal risk factors, broken family, poor parenting, unsafe parent-child attachment and childhood abuse. Future researches should focus on exploring the mechanisms of familial factors on subtypes of psychopathy, finding protective environmental factors that inhibit psychopathic expression and developing the biopsychosocial model of psychopathy, etc.

Key words: psychopathy, callous unemotional characteristics, familial risk factors