Approval Motive and Depression in Criminals and Non-Criminals

The present study aims to compare criminals and non-criminals on the basis of psychological factors like approval motive and depression. The study was conducted on 200 respondents including 100 criminals and 100 non-criminals. The criminals were selected from the four important jails of Bihar namely Patna, Buxar, Gaya and Bhagalpur and equal number of non-criminals (persons having non-criminals record) were also selected from the same four towns of Bihar mentioned above. The sample was purposive one and included only married males in the age group of 21 to 40, who had minimum education up to seventh standard. The scales used were (1) Approval Motive Scale developed by Tripathi and Tripathi (1980) and (2) Beck Depression Inventory (BDI, Hindi adaptation by Arora et al., 1988). The data obtained were analyzed by t-test. The hypotheses formulated were: (1)The criminals would score lower on normative behavior as compared to non-criminals. (2) The criminal group of subjects would score lower on social conformity than the non-criminal group of subjects.(3) The criminals would score lower on positive self-presentation area of approval motive as compared to non-criminal group of subjects.(4)The criminal group of subjects would score lower on the dependency area of approval motive compared to the non-criminal group of subjects. (5) The criminal group of subjects would score lower on defensiveness as compared to the non-criminals.(6)The criminals as a group would score lower on social responsiveness area of approval motive as compared to the non-criminal group of subjects. (7) The criminal group of subjects would score lower on social approval than the non-criminal group of subjects and,(8) The criminals would score higher on depression level than the non-criminals. The findings confirmed six hypotheses, while two hypotheses could not be substantiated.