Social Evaluative Anxiety, Hostility, Guilt Feeling, and Conflict over Hostility in Criminals and Non-criminals

The present study aims to compare criminals and non-criminals on the basis of psychological factors like social evaluative anxiety, hostility, guilt-feeling and conflict over hostility. 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) Social Evaluative Anxiety Scale (SEAS), Hindi adaptation of Watson and Friend's Scale of Social Avoidance and Distress and Fear of Negative Evaluation (1969) by Sheikh and Kaushik (1980), and (2) Questionnaire of Hostility, Guilt and Conflict (Q-HGC, Sowaid, 1972). The data obtained were analyzed by t-test. The hypotheses formulated were: (1) The criminals would score higher on social avoidance and distress component of Social Evaluative Anxiety Scale as compared to non-criminals. (2) The criminal group of subjects would score lower in fear of negative evaluation component of Social Evaluative Anxiety Scale than the non-criminal group of subjects. (3) The criminals would score higher on hostility as compared to the non-criminals. (4) The criminal group of subject would score lower on guilt feeling toward hostility than their non-criminal counterparts. (5) The criminal group of subjects would score high on conflict over feeling of hostility than the non-criminal group of subjects. The findings confirmed four hypotheses, while one hypothesis could not be substantiated.