ABSTRACT
Crime, with its attendant costs to victims and to society at large, has long been the focus of study by social scientists from a wide range of disciplines, such as criminology, sociology, and psychology. In this chapter, we propose a potentially fruitful avenue of exploration of criminality based on a psychological theory of acquired motivation proposed by Solomon and Corbit (1974). This opponent-process theory has already been shown to be applicable to a wide range of empirical observations of both animal and human behavior (cf. Solomon 1977, 1980). The theory encompasses phenomena as diverse as the social attachment process in ducklings (Hoffman and Solomon 1974; Starr 1978), fear conditioning and adjunctive behavior in rats (Maier et al. 1976; Overmier et al. 1979; Rosellini 1985; Rosellini and Lashley 1982), test anxiety in college students (Craig and Seigel 1980), job satisfaction (Landy 1978), addiction to jogging (Solomon 1980), parachute jumping (Epstein 1967), and addiction to opiate drugs (Solomon 1977). In short, the theory has demonstrated applicability to a wide range of repetitive behaviors. The scope of opponent-process theory rests in its assumption of a common motivational mechanism that operates in all instances in which there is repeated exposure to an affect-arousing stimulus. Similar underlying processes are postulated for all addiction cycles, regardless of whether or not the stimulus has intuitively obvious addicting properties.48
