An investigation of spitefulness in violent offenders: Associations with the dark triad and emotion dysregulation.

Background: Spitefulness is the inclination to inflict harm to someone else even at one's own expenses. The development of a self-report measure (the Spitefulness Scale [SS]) has fostered the investigation of the relationships between spitefulness and aggression-related variables.

Objective: The present study aims to investigate the construct of spitefulness in violent offenders.