Eysenck Theory of Criminal Personality Flashcards
What is the criminal personality according to Eysenck?
High Extravert/Neurotic/Psychotic Scores.
How did Eysenck measure the criminal personality?
Eysenck Criminal Personality Inventory
According to Eysenck, how does personality have an innate, biological basis?
Personality traits are biological in origin through the type of nervous system we inherit
How did Eysenck bring in the role of socialisation to the criminal personality?
Children are taught to delay gratification but those with high N and E scores are difficult to condition so as a result are more likely to be anti-social
What is extraversion?
Under active nervous system, seek excitement, need lots of external stimulation.
What is neuroticism?
High reactivity in SNS, difficult to predict, changeable emotions, unstable.
What is psychoticism?
High levels of testosterone, unemotional, cold, aggressive
What did Eysenck and Eysenck (1977) find?
Compared 2070 male prisoners’ scores on the (EPQ) with 2422 male controls. On measures of extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism - across all the age groups that were sampled - prisoners recorded higher average scores than controls. This agrees with the predictions of the theory that offenders rate higher than average across the three dimensions Eysenck identified.
Farrington et al. (1982)
meta-analysis of relevant studies and reported that offenders tended to score high on measures of psychoticism, but not for extraversion and neuroticism.
Why might Eysenck not take cultural factors into account?
Bartol and Holanchock (1979) studied Hispanic and African-American offenders in a maximum security prison in New York. The researchers divided these offenders into six groups based on their offending history and the nature of their offences. It was found that all six groups were less extravert than a non-offender control group whereas Eysenck would expect them to be more extravert
What is an issue with the EPQ?
Personality type may not be reducible to a score in this way.
Personality is too complex and dynamic to be quantified.
