PhD student Cheryl Peng believes that psychopathy can play an important role in risk assessment. But in China, she says, there is no common equivalent term. Her research aims to address this gap by studying how psychopathy may look different across cultures. She is developing a new psychometric tool to measure psychopathic traits in Chinese populations.
Peng has been interested in psychopathy and its causes throughout her academic career. Her undergraduate thesis looked at Countess Elizabeth Báthory of Ecsed, an alleged historical serial killer. Her master’s thesis then explored the relationship between parental abuse and psychopathic traits, and how that relationship might be shaped by culture.
An interest in crime
Peng’s route into criminology was not straightforward. She had long been interested in serial killers and personality disorders, but she did not know there was an academic subject called criminology. For a long time, she thought she would become a criminal lawyer.
The turning point came during an exchange year at the University of Copenhagen. She had applied for law modules but was placed on a criminology course.
“I was immediately fascinated,” says Peng. “I realised this was what I really wanted to study. Compared with law, criminology brought me much closer to understanding criminal behaviour itself.”
The professor who taught the course was an alumnus of the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge and strongly recommended the Institute to her. This led to Peng joining Cambridge to pursue an MPhil, and later a PhD. At the time, she was particularly interested in whether psychopathic traits, and their development, could be influenced by cultural environments. She saw the PhD as an opportunity to investigate this question more deeply.
Peng praises the institute for the interdisciplinary environment, strong grounding in research methods, and having the loveliest cohort.
“I realised that the staff in our department come from very different disciplines and backgrounds,” she recalls. “Now, every time I talk to them about my study, they bring in interesting perspectives that I’d never thought about, such as the ethical questions around psychopathy research and its biological dimensions.”
A gap in the knowledge
The idea for her current research emerged during her MPhil project. In that study, she found that the Chinese cultural concept of filial piety might moderate the development of psychopathic traits among adolescents with a history of parental abuse.
“One possible explanation is that children who are strongly taught to respect and obey their parents may be less likely to recognise parental abuse as abuse,” she says. “That does not mean they are not harmed by it. But it may change how they interpret it, report it, or respond to it.”
That finding led her to a larger question: if culture can shape how people understand family, emotion and harm, could it also shape how psychopathy is expressed and measured?
Peng found that many psychopathy measures, like many psychological tools more generally, were developed using Euro-American samples. Yet these tools are often used across the world, including in societies with very different emotional norms, family structures and social expectations. This matters because some questionnaire items may not mean the same thing in every culture. One widely used adolescent psychopathy scale, for example, includes statements such as ‘To be nervous and worried is a sign of weakness’ and ‘I think that crying is a sign of weakness, even if no one sees you’.
“If someone agrees with these statements, they may receive a higher score for callous-unemotional traits,” Peng explains. “But in China, many people grow up being told that crying is weakness, or that showing too much emotion is not good. So, are these items really measuring psychopathy? Or are they also measuring cultural norms about emotion?”
For Peng, this is one of the central problems in the field. A test may appear to work well in one society but produce misleading results in another.
She has also found that there is no widely used, direct equivalent of the word ‘psychopathy’ in Chinese.
This creates problems not only for research, but also for clinical and forensic practice. In interviews with psychiatrists and clinical psychologists in China, Peng found that some people who appear to show high levels of psychopathic traits may instead be diagnosed under other labels, such as antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, or even adult ADHD.
The same problem appears in media and public discussion. Offenders who might be described as psychopathic in English-language contexts are often referred to more vaguely in Chinese as ‘antisocial’, ‘mentally ill’, or simply ‘sick’.
A new approach
Peng believes this lack of language and measurement can have serious consequences. Without the right tools, professionals may struggle to identify psychopathic traits, assess risk, or design suitable interventions. Her work with prison systems and risk assessment experts in China has also made her aware of a wider problem: many psychological and risk assessment tools are still not well adapted to the Chinese context.
For Peng, the answer is not simply to translate existing Western tools into Chinese. Instead, she wants to build tools from the ground up, taking Chinese culture seriously from the start.
Her current research is still in the data-gathering stage. The goal is to develop a more culturally sensitive measure of psychopathy for Chinese populations. She also hopes the process can become a model for developing other local psychological assessments in China.
The key, she says, is to pay attention to the details of Chinese society: emotional restraint, family obligation, hierarchy, shame, face, obedience, and social conformity. These cultural
expectations may all affect how psychopathic traits are expressed, hidden, misunderstood or measured.
“My hope is that this project can help people see the limits of using the same psychological tools everywhere,” Peng says. “Many of our theories and assessments were built in Western contexts. That does not mean they are useless, but it does mean we need to ask whether they work in the same way in other societies.”
She hopes her research will eventually be useful beyond academia.
“For psychopathy assessment, I hope this work can one day be used in forensic and psychiatric settings in China,” she concludes. “More broadly, I hope it encourages people to take culture seriously when they think about mental health, personality and risk — because the same behaviour can carry very different meanings in different societies.”