Risk-taking behaviour and criminal offending: an investigation of sensation seeking and the Eysenck personality questionnaire.
This study investigated relationships between hostility, Zuckerman's sensation seeking, and Eysenck and Eysenck's personality scales within a prison population, to explore whether they could be conceptualized in terms of two socialized and unsocialized sensation seeking factors. Participants included 79 incarcerated adult male offenders (age range = 18-62). Findings support the distinction between socialized and unsocialized sensation seeking and suggest that these factors represent more overarching personality factors. Psychoticism was a clear marker of the more broad impulsive, unsocialized sensation seeking factor, rather than representing a supertrait in its own right. This factor was also represented by lie, disinhibition, and boredom susceptibility scales. Findings relating to hostility also supported such a reformulation, as unsocialized scales did cluster together to predict the unsocialized hostility factor, whereas unsocialized scales did not. The results demonstrate the need for a theoretical reformulation of the two given theories of personality.
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001143:Arousal; D003417:Criminal Psychology; D006791:Hostility; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010555:Personality Inventory / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011329:Prisoners / Q000523:psychology*; D011594:Psychometrics; D012309:Risk-Taking; D012951:Socialization