A contextualistic approach to antisocial personality

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a contextualistic account of antisocial responding, with the addition of recent developments on the study of personality.

Design/methodology/approach

A behavioural and contextualistic view point is developed to account for antisocial personality and related topics, inasmuch as traditional definitions of antisocial personality disorder as provided on formal diagnostic manuals derive on several and not always coherent classifications of antisocial behaviours. Some of these classifications centre on issues like guilt, impulsivity or aggressiveness for establishing different types of offending and antisocial patterns. This paper focuses on functional personal backgrounds.

Findings

A total of five types of “potentiated contingencies” are described as being the main underpinnings involved in antisocial patterns. An analysis of the transformation of aversive functions of antisocial behaviours, leads to specify a distinctive rule-following behaviour that is concerned with that responding. Finally, the exposition of the four verbal clinical contexts that behaviour analysis highlights as taking place at therapeutic settings, serves to propose a fitter contextualistic intervention for antisocial personality patterns.

Research limitations/implications

Novel investigations should contrast the functional classification of antisocial responding. Those studies should experimentally demonstrate the way in which the different instances of transformation of antisocial functions the author has described are prompted.

Practical implications

The analysis also allows for the anticipation of the behaviour of individuals fitting to every category of antisocial avoidance. And as the functional analysis of “antisocial avoidance” uncovers specific relations between environmental stimuli as they are produced and established in the history of interactions of individuals, a more fitting intervention based upon those relations is feasible.

Originality/value

An exhaustive functional taxonomy of antisocial personalities and delinquent behaviours has never been presented before elsewhere. Besides the author reinterprets from a contextualist position traditional empirical studies.

Article available at doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JCP-11-2013-0029