Abstract
The Overcontrolled Hostility (Q-H) subscale of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory differentiates murderers without previous criminal records from men who have committed less serious assaults and murderers with extensive histories of assault. Murderers scoring high on the O-H scale are described as passive and unassertive on the basis of their histories, and psychometric correlates of the O-H scale support this description. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether men who had committed very severe assaults and who scored high on the O-H scale had assertion deficits that could be measured behaviorally. High O-H murderers or attempted murderers in a maximum security psychiatric institution were compared with low O-H murderers or attempted murderers, non-person offenders, and a control group of primarily unemployed men from the local community on a variety of assertion measures. The high O-H group was significantly less assertive than each of the other groups in role playing tasks and on a questionnaire that asked subjects how aggressive they would be in extremely provocative situations. These findings support the O-H construct and suggest that assertion training may be a useful therapeutic technique to employ with high O-H murderers.
Published Version
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