NCJ Number
142456
Date Published
1971
Length
25 pages
Annotation
Research with the Overcontrolled Hostility (O-H) scale of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory has shown that high scores identify individuals whose massive repression of hostile or aggressive impulses leads to episodic acts of violence, and the present study explores the relation between O-H scores and the use of repressive defenses.
Abstract
Study subjects involved 45 youthful offenders at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, Florida; 15 had high O-H scores, 15 had midrange scores, and 15 had low scores. They were presented with pictures of violent and neutral scenes in a tachistoscope. Exposure times ranged from subliminal to suprathreshold for most subjects. As anticipated, the threshold for reporting correct perception of violent stimuli was significantly higher than the threshold for neutral stimuli for high O-H subjects. Although the magnitude of mean differences decreased regularly from the high O-H to the low O-H group, intergroup differences were not statistically significant. Implications of the findings for the O-H scale's construct validity are discussed. 39 references, 4 tables, and 5 figures