| How did Eysenck believe that personality could be measured by? | Could be measured by EPI (Eysenck personality inventory) - measues ppts on extraversion/introversion and neuroticism/stability scales. Later measured psychotisim |
| What is the criminal personality type? | Neurotic-extravert:
-Extraverts constantly seek exctiement, stimuluation and risk-taking behaviours, unlikely ot learn from thier mistakes
-Neurotic people tend be nervous, jumpy and difficult to predict due instability |
| What is the score on psychoticism? | Believed they would score highly on psychoticism - made them unemotional and prone to aggression |
| What was the biological bias that Eysenck believed in? | -Personality traits have a biological origin, based on the nervous system that they haev
-Extraverts have an underactive nervous system - makes them seek excitment, stimulation and risk. Don't condition easily |
| What is the sociological bias? | The role of socialiation.
Children taught through socialisation process how delay gratification and become more socially-oriented. |
| What did Eyneck belive about socilisation with criminals | ENPs were harder to condition, they have not learned the skills in chilhood - more developmentally immature, selfish and more likley to act antisocially in their behaviour |
| A strength of Eysenck's personality ? | -Wealth of empirical evidence through research he conducted to support ideas
-Comapred 2070 prisoners to 2422 controls on his EPI, found that across all age groups prisoners were higher in measures of E, N and P.
-However, more recent meta-analysis by Farrington found that offenders always scored highly on the P scale, but not also on E or N
-Modern EEG research used to measure cortical arousal levels haev also found no significant differneces between E and I peopel, challenging hte physiological bias |
| A weakness of Eysenck? | -The EPI was a self-report questionnaire
-Subject to social desirablity bias as people want to appear better. Closed questions also meant that ppts can't expand on their answers, making people choose soemthing different to their response, doesn't best represent their response
-As well as this, personalities change all the time, for example: in differnt setting like in school or with your firedn, parts of your personality might change therefore makes the data unreliable
-Furthermore, modern research suggests 5 new factors: open to experience, conscientiousness, extraveriosn, agreeableness and neuroticism (OCEAN) within personality which suggest that Eysenck's view was reductionist |
| A weakness of Eysenck? | -Contradictory evidence from Barlon and Holanchack
-Found that Hispanic and African-American offenders in a maximum security priosn in New York wre found to be less extraverted than a group of non-offdners when they were split into 6 groups depending on their offending hisotry and nature of their offence
-Findings were likely to occure due the systematic racism that coculd be seen in prisons at the time, meaning tha tthses priosners were less likley to be extraverted in order to keep themselves out of trouble
-Therefore, Eysenck's study of majority white, British offenders means that there is imposed etic seeing within the study as it is unable to be applied to multiple different samples and cultures. |
