When emotion is a problem: A meta-analytic study of the treatment effectiveness about people diagnosed as psychopaths

This paper reviews the effectiveness of treatments applied to psychopaths, employing the technique of meta-analysis and trying to study which are the variables that can be responsable of the results obtained. With the selected studies, two meta-analysis were carried out: the meta-analysis "A" ( N= 34) reviews the effectiveness of the different types of treatments in the different groups of psychopath versus non-psychopath groups (i.e. other diagnostic categories); the meta-analysis "B" (N= 19) analyses the effectiveness of the treatments applied to psychopaths, before and after the intervention (pre-post design). The fact that most of the studies have not a control/comparison group (with the exception of four studies which, incidentally, showed also a positive effect size: 0.12), and that the analysis of recidivism is very poor, can not be an excuse for denying the necesssity of more treatment programmes with better research.