Regulation Features in Individuals with Personality Disorders and Accentuated Personality Traits Who Committed Aggressive and Violent Crimes

Abstract

The paper investigates individual psychological features of self-regulation in people with personality disorders and accentuated personality traits. Our goal is to specify the data on regulation disorders taking into account the nature of committed offences so as to substantiate the validity of expert conclusions, promote individualization in punishment, and build models for secondary psychological prevention. We survey 134 men including 94 individuals with personality disorders, 20 individuals with accentuated personality traits and 20 individuals without mental disorders. We use a set of methodological tools to assess the extent of self-control deficiency); the set includes J. Kagan’s Matching Familiar Figures Test, situation analysis, a new questionnaire for tolerance toward uncertainty, J. Stroop’s Color and Word Test, behavioral self-regulation style. We carry out statistical processing of the data with the help of descriptive statistics method, frequency analysis, an independent samples t-test, the Mann–Whitney U-test, and the Kruskal-Wallis test to compare three independent samples. We have found out that regulation disorders in people with personality disorders who committed violent crimes are associated with the ability to predict the consequences adequately and find socially acceptable ways to resolve problem situations. We show that when an individual has to deal with information shortage,contradictory information, perceptual interference or increased emotional intensity of the situationthe probability of disorders in their conscious regulation of behavior increases significantly. Accordingly, to address the tasks of penal science and practice, we consider it expedient to use the indicators identified in the course of our present research, because they can be not only predictors of behavioral dysregulation and aggressive responses, but also targets for psychological therapy.

Keywords

• self-regulation
• personality disorders
• accentuated personality traits
• situation analysis
• type of offence