The Personalities and Emotional Regulation as a Mediator between Childhood Maltreatment and Criminal Behavior

Abstract

Childhood abuse is a serious topic of both public health and criminology whose relationship has been determined with the negative development, including antisocial and criminal behavior. However, the processes behind psychological processes through which childhood trauma is transformed into future criminal propensity are not well understood. In this study, the mediating role of personality structure and emotional dysregulation is explored in the relationship between abuse when young and tendencies towards criminal behaviors. A cross-sectional, quantitative design was used, in which 50 students (25 male and 25 female) from the university were sampled, and the students were aged 18-25. The questionnaires were the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire-Short Form (CTQ-SF), the Big Five Inventory-10 (BFI-10), the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale-Short Form (DERS-SF), and an Adapted Self-Report Delinquency Scale. Correlation tests indicated that childhood abuse had a strong positive correlation with maladaptive personality traits (high Neuroticism, low Agreeableness, low Conscientiousness), emotional dysregulation, and propensity to crime. Using the Hayes macro on the mediation analysis termed PROCESS, the test results indicated that personality traits, including emotional dysregulation, mediated the abuse-criminality relationship without each other. In addition, a significant sequential mediation was established, according to which childhood abuse was associated with a less stable personality structure, which, in its turn, led to more emotional dysregulation, which, in its turn, predetermined more criminal tendencies. These findings present the importance of a mechanism-based approach. These suggest that the prevention of the criminal outcomes following the victims of abuse should extend beyond the treatment of the trauma symptoms and will also involve the intervention aimed at establishing resilient personalities and central emotion regulation skills. Theoretical contributions to developmental psychopathology and criminology are discussed.

Keywords

• Criminal behaviors
• emotional dysregulation
• Five-Factor Model
• childhood abuse
• mediation
• trauma