Running Head: RISK TAKING BEHAVIOR AND CRIMINAL OFFENDING Risk-taking Behaviour and Criminal Offending: An Investigation of Sensation Seeking and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire

The main objective of the current study was to investigate the relationships between Zuckerman’s (1979) sensation seeking and Eysenck and Eysenck’s (1976) personality scales, and how these relate to hostility within a prison population, to explore whether they could be conceptualized in terms of two socialized and unsocialized sensation seeking factors. Participants included 79 adult male offenders (age range = 18-62), imprisoned in correctional centers in South East Queensland. The findings of the present study support the distinction between socialized and unsocialized sensation seeking, and suggest that these factors represent more overarching personality factors characterized by Zuckerman’s and Eysenck and Eysenck’s sub-traits. In particular, Eysenck and Eysenck’s (1976) psychoticism trait was demonstrated be a clear marker of the more broad impulsive, unsocialized sensation seeking factor, rather than representing a super-trait in its own right. This factor was also represented by lie, disinhibition and boredom susceptibility scales. The findings relating to hostility also supported such a reformulation, in that scales earlier identified as unsocialized factors did cluster together to predict the unsocialized hostility factor, whereas unsocialized scales did not. The results demonstrate the need for a theoretical reformulation of the two given theories