Examining the association between childhood cognitive ability and psychopathic traits at age 48.

Despite early theorists suggesting that psychopathic traits are associated with higher intelligence, meta-analytic work has found that global psychopathy scores are actually negatively related to intelligence, albeit weakly. Furthermore, it was reported in the same meta-analytic work that the various dimensions of psychopathy were differentially related to intelligence. Importantly, virtually all of the research to date has relied on...