Personality psychology is a rapidly maturing science making important advances on both conceptual and methodological fronts. The Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology offers a one-stop source for the most up-to-date scientific personality psychology. It provides a summary of cutting-edge personality research in all its forms, from DNA to political influences on its development, expression, pathology and applications. The chapters are informative, lively, stimulating and, sometimes, controversial and the team of international authors, led by two esteemed editors, ensures a truly wide range of theoretical perspectives. Each research area is discussed in terms of scientific foundations, main theories and findings, and future directions for research. With useful descriptions of technological approaches (for example, molecular genetics and functional neuroimaging) the Handbook is an invaluable aid to understanding the central role played by personality in psychology and will appeal to students of occupational, health, clinical, cognitive and forensic psychology.

Although distinct offence action patterns have been identified for different forms of sexual and violent crime, a generic psychological framework for this differentiation has yet to be advanced. An innovative framework derived from the emerging criminal narrative approach provides a significant contribution to the differentiation of offending styles. Canter (1994) argues that offenders’ empathy deficit leads them to assign a Victim, Object or Person role to their victims within their personal narratives. The evidence for this model is examined across 33 offence actions in 66 stranger rapes, 24 offence actions in 50 stalking offences and 39 offence actions in 50 serial murder offences. Hypothesised offence actions reflecting the Roles are found in distinct regions of Smallest Space Analysis (SSA-I) configurations for all three offence types. This evidence across diverse offence forms leads to the suggestion that the Roles assigned to victims within offenders’ narratives provide a generic framework for differentiating offending styles in all interpersonal crimes. The different Victim Roles articulate qualitatively different variants of the established control and empathy deficit components in sexual and violent offending, contributing to the debate about the operation of these components and having significant treatment implications.