A separate published SD4 subscale
Read the seven-item Psychopathy mean with its actual wording, source and limits. No diagnosis, type or population rank.
Seven numeric ratings required; raw sum / 7. Any unscored response means no personal mean for this subscale.
What the published items actually ask
This SD4 subscale combines reports about being described as out of control, opposing authority and rules, fights, acting before asking questions, trouble with the law, dangerous situations and making people regret provoking you. Some statements concern beliefs or tendencies and others refer to past experience. The author’s English wording has no common recall period, so this page does not silently impose a past-month or past-year window. A mean summarises these answers without establishing what happened in a particular event.
A sensitive item can remain unscored
You may not want to respond to a statement about legal trouble or fights. Choose the website’s unscored response instead of treating uncertainty or refusal as neutral agreement. This extension is separate from the author’s five numeric anchors. The page requires seven numeric ratings to display this subscale’s mean and does not estimate a missing answer from the others. If even one is unscored, you can still finish the form and read the full guide without a personal mean for this part.
The research name is not a diagnosis
Psychopathy is the authors’ research label for this seven-item set. The result does not diagnose a mental disorder, identify a criminal, determine dangerousness or decide whether someone is safe to trust. It is not a forensic instrument or an assessment of a person who has not answered for themselves. Clinical and legal conclusions require different evidence and qualified processes; this self-report page supplies neither. A low mean is also not a guarantee about future behaviour or the absence of serious difficulties.
One average can conceal different histories
Two people can reach the same mean while endorsing quite different statements about rules, impulsive action or past events. The questionnaire cannot establish when an event occurred, the surrounding constraints, the role of self-defence or what another person observed. It does not investigate an allegation. Avoid turning the average into a reconstruction of someone’s history or using an isolated response as proof. If the wording feels unsuitable, keeping the part unscored is a valid way to retain that uncertainty.
No conversion from other dark-trait versions
This is the published SD4 seven-item subscale within a 28-item form. It is not an interchangeable substitute for another psychopathy inventory, the SD3, the Dirty Dozen or FermatMind’s original Mini themes. The four SD4 means remain separate and have no universal high or low threshold on this website. We do not apply the student norm table distributed with an author document as a general-population reference, and the working Chinese translation has not received psychometric validation here.
Keep any reflection private and specific
If you choose to reflect, focus on what you understood by one statement rather than trying to settle whether a label fits. There is no need to describe a legal event, disclose violence or ask anyone else to provide an account. The form stores answers only in current page memory and does not offer a personal-result share button. You can refresh or leave to end the attempt. Reading without producing a personal score is an equally available outcome.
Source, language and the limits of the version
This page follows the 28 English statements and five agreement anchors published on coauthor Erin Buckels’ SD4 project page, crosschecked against the instrument distributed by Delroy Paulhus. Paulhus lists SD4 among measures in the public domain available without permission. The cited article is Paulhus, Buckels, Trapnell and Jones, published in 2021. Our Chinese wording is a working translation, not a validated Chinese form. Publication of the original instrument does not establish validity, norms or accuracy for this website’s users or this translation.
Seven direct ratings and an unrounded mean
Use 1 Strongly Disagree, 2 Disagree, 3 Neutral, 4 Agree and 5 Strongly Agree. Three is the numeric neutral response, not missing information. All 28 items are direct, with no reverse scoring. For each subscale, seven numeric ratings produce their sum divided by seven, displayed to two decimals from the unrounded sum. One, two, three, four, five, three and three sum to 21 and give 3.00. Any unscored response withholds that subscale’s mean; nothing is imputed. No total, dominant type, percentile or cutoff is calculated.