Gender-based personality traits in physically aggressive and non-aggressive antisocial behaviours

Abstract

Background The current study aimed to understand the role of callousness, affective dissonance, and two subtypes of sensation seeking personality traits – 1) disinhibition and 2) thrill and adventure seeking – in physically aggressive and non-aggressive antisocial behaviours (ASB) among educated youth and to explore the gender differences in them. Participants and procedure An online survey was sent to a large sample of students at a UK university. Initially, a sample of N = 539 participants was collected but after screening out the data, N = 429 participants were included for analyses based on the sam-pling criteria. Results Callousness, disinhibition, and affective dissonance significantly predicted both antisocial behaviour subtypes. We found multidimensional nature of callousness in predicting antisocial behaviours, and an intriguing relationship be-tween thrill and adventure seeking and affective dissonance. Interesting gender differences emerged. Conclusions This study has implications for the understanding of the competitive roles of gender-based psychopathological per-sonality traits in terms of callousness and affective dissonance and sensation seeking tendencies in physically ag-gressive and non-aggressive antisocial behaviours.

Keywords

• sensation seeking
• disinhibition
• thrill and adventure seeking
• callousness
• affective dissonance
• antisocial behaviours