PERSONALITY AND ANTI-SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR IN SCHOOLBOYS

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related to the psychoticism personality dimension (Eysenck, 1970; Eysenck and Eysenck, 1970). Using a specially constructed personality inventory (the PI), Eysenck and Eysenck (1970) showed a group of prisoners to be clearly higher than three control groups on P and N, but not on E. Several similar studies have failed to confirm Eysenck's prediction with respect to E (Bartholomew, 1959; Field, 1959; Fitch, 1962), and this is possibly due to the effect of institutionalisation on responses to E items, especially those con cerning sociability, for studies relating delinquency to extraversion amongst schoolboys have consistently shown strong results in the predicted direction (Allsopp, 1972; Allsopp and Feldman, 1974; Gibson, 1967b; Saxby, Norris and Feldman, 1970). However, West and Farrington (1973), in discussing the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development , reported that they were not able to confirm Eysenck's theory that neurotic extraversion is related to delinquency (p. 198). In order to provide further information on personality differences, Eysenck and Eysenck (1971 ) compared the individual item responses of the prisoners with those of the three control groups used in the above study. Most of the P items showed a marked difference in the predicted direction, and a consideration of those which failed to discriminate led to the authors suggest that this may have been due to their similarity with L items, thus causing the prisoners to provide conventional modes of response. Some of the N items differentiated well in the predicted direction whereas others, if anything, showed the criminals to score lower with respect to N. An inspection suggested that the differentiating items are of an autonomic type, i.e. referring to direct manifestations of sympathetic arousal, or else to intro spective interpretations of such arousal in the form of worry or feelings of tenseness, being ' highly strung ', nervous, etc. (p. 53). With respect to E, an attempt was made to test the hypothesis that sociability items would discriminate less well than impulsiveness items. This was clearly upheld, the majority of the former items either not discriminating at all or doing so in the wrong direction, whereas most of the latter clearly showed prisoners to be higher on the impulsiveness aspect of E. Eysenck and Eysenck selected