Abstract: With the persistent growth of the crime rate, crime prevention has been recently raised again as a hot field. Evaluation of violent risk is an affective way to prevent crime and violent attitude is one of the most important factors involved in this kind of research. Violent attitude, as an object of attitude, has a structure composed of explicit and implicit facet. Traditionally, the explicit attitude was the focus that people used to evaluate, but we could not reveal the essential of violent attitude and the results will affect the validity of violence prevention as well. The purpose of this study is to investigate the characteristics of explicit and implicit violent attitude of passionate criminals and recidivists based on the methods of explicit measurement and implicit measurement respectively, and to discuss violent attitude from a different point of view.
One hundred and twenty-three male criminals (53 passionate criminals and 70 recidivists) were involved in this study. The explicit violent attitude was assessed using the FMMU Abnormal Personality Risk Factors Inventory (FMMU-APRI), whereas the implicit violent attitude was measured using Implicit Attitude Test (IAT). The data was analyzed in SPSS 13.0 and the t-test and the correlation coefficient were considered.
First, the results showed that there was a significant difference between the score of FMMU-APRI in passionate criminals and that of recidivists, but no IAT effect was found within each group which was probably covered by a “reversed” effect. Then, we divided the passionate criminals group into two sub-groups according to the appearance of “reversed” effect, reversed group (reversed group of passionate criminals, RG-PC) and non-reversed group (NRG-PC). In the same way, we got RG-R (reversed group of recidivists) and NRG-R(non-reversed group of recidivists). The IAT effect was all observed within these four sub-groups. Next, the score of FMMU-APRI of four sub-groups were compared with the norm. The results showed that NRG-PC and NRG-R got the significant higher score than the norm, and no difference was found in the other two groups when compared with the norm. So, we found the disassociation phenomena between explicit violent attitude and implicit violent attitude of passionate criminals as well as recidivists.
Passionate criminals and recidivists have the same behaviors which have already offended the law, but their violent attitudes are not the same. And, even the same type of criminals also has the different violent attitudes. So, we suggest that we should catalogue the criminals not only based on their explicit offensive behavior, but also on their implicit violent attitude, and also consider the individuality to rebuild the criminals as well.

Key words: violent attitude, FMMU Abnormal Personality Risk Factors Inventory, Implicit Association Test, explicit attitude, implicit attitude