EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES AND THE MANIFESTATION OF ANTISOCIAL PERSONALITY AMONG PRISON INMATES

This study is purposed to establish the relationship between early negative childhood experiences and the manifestation of antisocial personality. An antisocial personality scale and early childhood experience scale were used to obtain information from eighty (80) prison inmates, who participated in the study. The Pearson Moment Correlation analysis of the data showed that negative experience in the early childhood development has a strong positive relationship with antisocial personality, thereby confirming the hypothesis that early childhood experiences contributed to the manifestation of antisocial personality among prison inmates. It was recommended that parents should not expose children to aggressive acts, especially in their formative years so that they do not learn those acts to be used in later periods of their development.