The Role of Parenting Style and Childhood Friendship in Predicting Risk of Adulthood Psychopathy

In this work, we investigated the role of parenting style and childhood friendship in predicting the risk of adulthood psychopathy. This paper concluded that negative parenting, parental psychopathic traits and antisocial friendship played a vital role in shaping the antisocial behaviour of their offspring. Additionally, there was an inconsistent relationship between parental psychopathic traits (mainly focusing on conduct problems and callous-unemotional traits), negative parenting and offsprings psychopathic traits, highlighting the importance of sensitive caring from parents before adolescence. However, childrens empathy levels have a moderating effect on their perceptions of parenting which directly affected the development of psychopathic traits. Likewise, childhood friendship can either alleviate or induce childrens antisocial behaviour, and opposite-sex friends were found to be positively correlated with disruptive behaviours. Unexpectedly, the quality of friendships, peer pressure, and positive parenting have a profound impact and they interrelate with one another in the formation of individual behaviours. By considering these factors collectively, this work gained the capacity to predict the probability of children developing psychopathy, and potentially utilize this knowledge for intervention purposes.