Eysencks Theory A03

Question 1

Research support - strength - Sybil and Hans Eysenck

Answer 1

• compared 2070 prisoners’ scores on the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) with 2422 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

Question 2

Counterpoint - David Farrington et al. (1982)

Answer 2

• conducted a meta-analysis of relevant studies and reported that offenders tended to score high on measures of psychoticism, but not for extraversion and neuroticism.
• There is also inconsistent evidence of differences on EEG measures (used to measure cortical arousal) between extraverts and introverts (Küssner 2017)
• which casts doubt on the physiological basis of Eysencks theory.
  This means some of the central assumptions of the criminal personality have been challenged.

Question 3

Too simplistic - limitation - Terrie moffitt

Answer 3

• drew a distinction between offending behaviour that only occurs in adolescence (adolescence-limited) and that which continues into adulthood (life-course-persistent).
• She argued that personality traits alone were a poor predictor of how long offending behaviour would go on for, in the sense of whether someone is likely to become a career offender.
• She considered persistence in offending behaviour to be the result of a reciprocal process between individual personality traits on the one hand, and environmental reactions to those traits on the other.
• This presents a more complex picture than Eysenck suggested, that the course of offending behaviour is determined by an interaction between personality and the environment.

Question 4

Cultural factors - limitation. - curt bartol and Howard holanchock. 1979

Answer 4

• 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.
• Bartol and Holanchock suggested that this was because the sample was a very different cultural group from that investigated by Eysenck
• This questions how far the criminal personality can be generalised and
  suggests it may be a culturally relative concept.