Depression, Hostility, Guilt Feeling and Conflict Over Hostility in Criminals and Non-Criminals:A Comparative Study

The present study aims to compare criminals and non-criminals on the basis of psychological factors like depression, guilt-feeling, hostility, 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 incidental-cum-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) Beck Depression Inventory (BDI, Hindi adaptation by Arora et al., 1988), and Questionnaire of Hostility, Guilt and Conflict (Q-HGC, Sowaid & Singh, 1975). The data obtained were analyzed by t-test. The hypotheses formulated were: (1) the criminals would score higher on depression level than the non-criminals. (2) The criminals would score higher on hostility as compared to the non-criminals. (3) The criminal group of subject would score lower on guilt feeling toward hostility than their non-criminal counterparts and, (4) the criminal group of subjects would score high on conflict over feeling of hostility than the non-criminal group of subjects. The findings confirmed all the four hypotheses.