Larisa V. Karapetyan, Dr. Sci. (Psychology), Associate professor, Associate professor at General and Personal Psychology chair of Psychology Department of Institute of Social and Political sciences of the Ural Federal University after the First Russian President B. N. Eltsin, Head of the Ural branch of Emergency Psychological Assistance Centre, EMERCOM of Russia, Yekaterinburg, Russia.

A rise in crime, the change in its qualitative characteristics jeopardizes the security of civilians in Russia. This fact testifies to the need for designing new approaches to study features, including typological ones, of culprits. The paper reported findings of the survey on emotional and personal wellbeing (EPW) of inmates. The sample consisted of 351 prisoners, 178 of whom were women, and 173 – men. A group of law-abiding citizens (n = 1878) acted as a comparison group. The author used her Self-Assessment of Emotional and Personal Wellbeing (SEPW) scale. The results allowed the author to conclude that inmates exhibit a lower emotional and personal wellbeing and its components than the respondents of the comparison group. The clustering of the overall sample population into groups with different types of EPW showed that the majority of detainees fall in the intense negative EPW self-assessment group. However, about the third of the inmates are concentrated in groups with higher SEPW estimates. The MBTI scale administered to the sample of inmates (n = 351) and the comparison group (n = 506) made it possible to identify the typology of the groups under scrutiny. Psychologists of the penitentiary system can make use of the revealed typological characteristics to tackle a detainee’s personality on a wider basis and to develop an individual approach to reforming offenders as well as define measures and the nature of preventive activities.

Karapetyan LV. Characteristics of Emotional and Personal Wellbeing of Prisoners. In: Perelygina EB, Zotova OYu, Drozdova AV, Tarasova LV. (eds.) Wellbeing and Security in the Face of Social Transformations: Collection of academic papers from the 10th International Symposium (Yekaterinburg, July 9–10, 2019). Yekaterinburg: Liberal Arts University – University for Humanities; 2019. p. 162–172. Available from: doi:10.35853/LAU.WS.2019.SP17.

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