The Role of Gender, Empathy, Sensation Seeking, and Callousness in Physically Aggressive And Non-Aggressive Antisocial Behaviours Among Students

Abstract

 The aim of this study was to find out if subtypes of empathy, sensation seeking and callous and unemotional traits predicted physically aggressive and non-aggressive antisocial behaviours in a student sample and also if there were any gender differences. An online survey on Qualtrics was administered to 428 university volunteers aged 18-25 years, with 9 personality measures through university email distribution list. Hierarchical regression analyses were used. Callousness was the only personality variable to contribute unique variance with age providing further unique variance. This study showed an important interplay of callous and unemotional traits, empathy and sensation seeking in differentially predicting gender-based antisocial behaviour subtypes. The current study has elaborated gender-based personality models predicting physically aggressive and the non-aggressive antisocial behaviour subtypes and contributed to the understanding of psychopathy.