Assessing punitiveness with the hostility and direction of hostility questionnaire (HDHQ).

Abstract

Foulds' theory of personality (1965) lays stress on the need to consider the individual as a person in relation to others. Where the ability to enter into mutual personal relations with others denotes the mature individual, egocentricity in thinking and behaving marks out the immature. One feature of egocentricity is the need to apportion blame in any given situation, either to other people or to the self, so that Foulds found punitiveness a useful attitudinal measure of egocentricity. Rosenzweig's (1934) terms extrapunitiveness and intropunitiveness were used by Foulds, Caine and Creasy (1960) to identify punitiveness directed outward on to other people and inward on to the self; these authors devised subscales, three extrapunitive and two intropunitive, to tap various aspects of punitive expression. From the pattern of correlations between the subscales, they tentatively posited a factor of general hostility, while pointing out that the correlations were such as to indicate that the extrapunitiveness subscales were measuring something different from the intropunitiveness subscales.