Question

Aileen Wuornos, one of America's most infamous female serial killers, was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. Based on statistical data and your text, how would you describe the relationship between antisocial personality disorder and criminality? Support your conclusions with a quality source.

Answer 1

ANTISOCIAL PERSONALITY

According to DSM _IV -TR antisocial personality is a pervasive pattern of disregard for ,and violation of the rights of the others occuring at the age of 15 years .Its core charecteristics includes repeatedly performing acts that could lead to arrest ,repeated lying ,using aliases,or conning others for personal profit or for pleasure.Impulsivity and failure to plan ahead.Reckless disregard for the safety of self or others.Consistent irresponsibility ,repeated failure to sustain work,or honour financial obligations .Lack of remorse for others.

People with antisocial personality have been described as having a developmental delay in moral maturity and cognitive functioning,and tend to operate at a concrete rather than an abstract level of intellectual functioning .As a consequence ,they lack problem solving skills ,and tend to solve impulsively with little consideration of long term consequences.They often believe they can do exactly what they want and other people are there to be exploited for their benefit.Antisocial personality appears to remit with age .

CRIMINALITY

Criminality is a specific personality profile that causes the most dangerous sorts of a crime.Criminal behaviours always involves the use of force ,fraud ,or stealth to obtain certain materials .Actually criminality is a behavioural disorder which resulted due to one's self centeredness.Along with that indifference to the suffering and needs of others and low  self control also contributes to the criminal behaviour.

When viewing through a systematic perspective criminal behaviour is the product of a systematic process that involves complex interactions between individual ,societal and ecological factors over the course of our lives.

Hare (1991 )formulated a new criteria to diagnose between the antisocial behaviour and psychopathy .These identified two major clusters of behaviours charecteristics of people with psychopathy.Emotional detatchment and an antisocial life style .Emotional detatchment involve alack of capacity to process emotional information and a consequent lack of uderstanding and disregard for the emotions of others.Using this defenition of psychopathology ,Hare found that up to 80% of criminals could be categorised as having antisocial personality disorder.