罗伯特·D·哈尔

Robert D. Hare (born 1 January 1934) is a Canadian forensic psychologist, known for his research in the field of criminal psychology. He is a professor emeritus of the University of British Columbia where he specializes in psychopathology and psychophysiology.

Hare developed the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-Revised), used to assess cases of psychopathy. He advises the FBI's Child Abduction and Serial Murder Investigative Resources Center (CASMIRC) and consults for various British and North American prison services.

Life and career

Hare was born on January 1, 1934, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Hare's father was a roofing contractor and his mother was of French Canadian descent. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Calgary. Hare attended the University of Alberta for a Bachelor of Arts degree which ended up 'more by default' with an emphasis on psychology. In 1959, he married Averil Hare whom he met in an abnormal psychology class, and a year later, their daughter, Cheryl, was born.

In 1960, Hare completed a Master of Arts in psychology at the University of Alberta. He then moved to the USA to study for a PhD program in psychophysiology at the University of Oregon, but due to his daughter falling ill the family returned to Canada. Hare then worked as the psychologist in the prison system in British Columbia (British Columbia Penitentiary) for eight months, an area in which he had no particular qualification or training; indeed he would later recount in Without Conscience that some prisoners were able to manipulate him. Hare then moved to London, Ontario, where he completed his PhD (1963) at the University of Western Ontario with a dissertation on the effects of punishment on behaviour. His research led him to The Mask of Sanity by American psychiatrist Hervey M. Cleckley, which played a pivotal role in the concept of psychopathy he applied and developed.

Hare then returned to Vancouver, British Columbia, working as a professor at the UBC's psychology department, where he would stay for 30 years until retirement, and undertaking research at the same prison he had previously worked in. He concluded that the reason some prisoners seemed not to change their behavior in response to punishment was because they were psychopaths. He recalls, "I happened to get into an area that nobody else was working in". Hare has said of himself and his wife Averil that family and the loss of family (their daughter Cheryl died from multiple sclerosis in 2003) "defines an awful lot about who Averil and I are." Averil, his wife, is a researcher and prominent social worker in Canada specializing in child abuse and child welfare.

In the 1970s he published Psychopathy: Theory and Research, summarizing the state of the field, and became internationally influential in reviving and shaping the concept.

Hare retired in 2000, closing his psychopathy research lab at the University of British Columbia. In 2010, he was awarded the Canadian Psychological Association's Donald O. Hebb Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology as a Science. The same year, he was named a member of the Order of Canada.

Research

Causes of psychopathy

Hare's research on the causes of psychopathy focused initially on whether such persons show abnormal patterns of anticipation or response (such as low levels of anxiety or high impulsiveness) to aversive stimuli ('punishments' such as mild but painful electric shocks) or pleasant stimuli ('rewards', such as a slide of a naked body). Further, following Cleckley, Hare investigated whether the fundamental underlying pathology is a semantic affective deficit - an inability to understand or experience the full emotional meaning of life events. While establishing a range of idiosyncrasies in linguistic and affective processing under certain conditions, the research program has not confirmed a common pathology of psychopathy. Hare's contention that the pathology is likely due in large part to an inherited or 'hard wired' deficit in cerebral brain function remains speculative.

Hare has defined sociopathy as a condition distinct from psychopathy, caused by growing up in an antisocial or criminal subculture rather than being marked by a basic lack of social emotion or moral reasoning. He has also regarded the DSM-IV diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder as separate to his concept of psychopathy, as it did not list the same underlying personality traits. He suggests that ASPD would cover several times more people than psychopathy, and that while the prevalence of sociopathy is not known it would likely cover considerably more people than ASPD.

Assessment tools

Frustrated by a lack of agreed definitions or rating systems of psychopathy, Hare began developing a Psychopathy Checklist. Produced for initial circulation in 1980, the same year that the DSM changed its diagnosis of sociopathic personality to antisocial personality disorder, it was based largely on the list of traits advanced by Cleckley, with whom Hare corresponded over the years. Hare redrafted the checklist in 1985 following Cleckley's death in 1984, renaming it the Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R). It was finalised as a first edition in 1991, when it was also made available to the criminal justice system, which Hare says he did despite concerns that it was not designed for use outside of controlled experimental research. It was updated with extra data in a 2nd edition in 2003.

The PCL-R was reviewed in Buros Mental Measurements Yearbook (1995), as being the "state of the art" both clinically and in research use. In 2005, the Buros Mental Measurements Yearbook review listed the PCL-R as "a reliable and effective instrument for the measurement of psychopathy" and is considered the 'gold standard' for measurement of psychopathy. However, it is also criticised.