Abstract: Antisocial personality is a type of personality disorder which is most closely related with criminal activities. This paper briefly reviews the history of the study of antisocial personality, and summarizes the achievements on diagnosis and assessment of antisocial personality and its affecting factors. At the end,the article points out not only the problems existing in present study ,such as confusing concepts in the study ,the single-object of the study,ignoring to inquire into its inner structure and so on,but also the directions to future research in which we should develop the cross-cultural research

Key words: antisocial personality, psychopathy, diagnostic criteria