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 the-v could be conceptualized in terms of two socialized and unsocialized sensation seeking factors. participants included 79 incarcerated adult male offenders (age range = 1862). 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 personality.