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Criminal Psychology Flashcards

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1
Q

Four stages of the cognitive interview

A
  1. Report everything
  2. Context reinstatement
  3. Reverse the order
  4. Change the perspective
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2
Q

Why use the cognitive interview

A

Want to ask little questions as every question holds the chance of contaminating memory. Every question has been thought about before to evaluate its value.

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3
Q

What does the cognitive interview do that the standard interview doesn’t ?

A

Breaks normal conversation rules. Allowing us to speak in more detail.

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4
Q

What did Geiselman find about the cognitive interview?

A
  • the CI decreased the witnesses susceptibility to misleading questions and prevented the original memory trace from being altered.
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5
Q

What did Fisher find about the cognitive interview?

A

Carried out a field test on the use of CI.
Compared performance of police forces before and after CI training. The detectives collected substantially more information after training, most of which was found to be accurate.

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6
Q

What was a downfall of Geiselman?

A

41 facts in CI compared to 29 however 7 of those 41 were incorrect.
Research also found more confabulation in witness statements when cognitive interview has been used.

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7
Q

What is weapon focus effect ?

A

The tendency for witnesses who observe an armed criminal to direct their attention toward the weapon so they fail to encode and remember information about the perpetrators physical appearance as accurately as they would have if no weapon had been visible.

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8
Q

What does Loftus say about weapon focus affect?

A

It occurs due to threat level of the weapon. That is why we focus on it.

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9
Q

Why does pickle say weapon focus effect occurs?

A

Unusualness. He tested undergraduates who watched a videotape of a gun-armed man. Their descriptions of him were less accurate if he was pictured in a scene where the gun was unusual and not expected, such as at a baseball game rather than at a shooting range.weapon focus effect is diminished when the weapon is anticipated.

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10
Q

What are some gender differences in crime stats?

A
  • 16% of all arrests were of females
  • all those prosecuted and sentenced 27% were female and 73% were male
  • 95.5% of the prison population is male
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11
Q

What do psychologists agree on with the gender gap?

A

That it is universal, particularly when it comes to violent crimes.

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12
Q

How could personality and temperament explain gender differences?

A
  • Males more likely to be diagnosed with ASPD (could be diagnostic bias)
  • women more likely to be neurotic and males higher in psychoticism
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13
Q

How could labelling theory and SFP explain gender differences ?

A
  • Boys and girls are socialised differently and expectations are different. Girls more supervised, boys encouraged to take risks.
  • CJS more likely to label males.
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14
Q

How could XYY be an explanation for gender differences?

A
  • Similar rates of criminality with XXY which led psychologists to conclude it was about the bullying and self-esteem of not living up to the societal idea of typical masculinity.
  • XYY only in males
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15
Q

How could brain injury/ damage explain gender differences in criminality?

A

Males more likely to suffer TBI than females through exposure to risky social behaviour like fighting, sport and car accidents.

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16
Q

Cycle of labelling? Who was is developed by?

A
  • negative label
  • self concept
  • label reinforcement by community and others
  • master status
  • self fulfilling prophecy
  • deviant career
    Developed by Becker
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17
Q

What are brain injuries as a result of sports accidents or falls called?

A

Acquired brain injuries (ABI)

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18
Q

What are the last things to develop in the brain?

A

Impulse control and forward planning

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19
Q

What happens if you have ABI?

A

Can disrupt brain development
Fails to move past reckless, risk-taking behaviours associated with childhood
Destabilise mood, concentration and decision making
Making offending behaviour more likely

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20
Q

What time does brain injury most impact the brain?

A

Childhood

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21
Q

Who analysed data from 196inmates from a UK jail?

A

Williams et al

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22
Q

What did Williams et al do?

A

Analysed data from 196 inmates from a UK jail in 2010

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23
Q

Results of William et al ?

A

60% of sample recalled a history of one or more heads injury in their youth
This 60% tended to be:
- young at the time of their first offence
- have higher rates of reoffending
- spent more time in prison in the past five years than the rest of the sample

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24
Q

What’s the amygdala?

A
  • almond shaped structure
  • located in temporal lobe in both hemispheres of the brain
  • directs how we react to threatening situations
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25
Q

How is the amygdala linked to aggression?

A

Abnormalities in:
- size
- structure
- activity

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26
Q

What did Dustin Pardini do?

A
  • nueroimaging scans on a group of 26 year old men
  • divided into normal amygdala size and reduced volume size
  • returned 3 years late
    Reduced volume size were 3 times more likely to be aggressive, violent and show psychopathic traits than the normal size.
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27
Q

What is XYY syndrome?

A

1 in 10,000 men are born with an additional Y chromosome.
No effect on testosterone levels or sexual development
Some behavioural and physical differences
Connected to aggression and crime

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28
Q

How does XYY syndrome present physically and behaviourally?

A
  • taller than average
  • lower intelligence
  • impulsivity
  • experience behavioural difficulties
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29
Q

What did Patricia Jacobs et all find about XXY syndrome?

A
  • conducted a chromosome survey of male patients at a state hospital in Scotland
  • men with the XXY chromosomal pattern were over-represented in prison populations
  • around 15 per 10,000 compared to the general population.
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30
Q

What is Eysenck’s theory called?

A

Theory of the criminal personality

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31
Q

What are the two dimensions to measure personality?

A
  • EXTRAVERSION-INTROVERSION
  • NEUROTICISM-STABILITY
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32
Q

Explain extraversion?

A
  • Crave excitement and stimulation
  • prone to engage in dangerous, risk-taking behaviour
  • do not condition easily, do not learn from mistakes
  • not affected as strongly by punishment as an introvert
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33
Q

Explain Neuroticism?

A
  • nervy and anxious
  • difficult to predict
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34
Q

What does Eysenck say the typical criminal personality is?

A

Extravert-neurotic

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35
Q

What was the third dimension Eysenck added?

A

Psychoticism

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36
Q

What does psychoticism entail?

A

An individual who is self-centred, cold and lacks empathy for others

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37
Q

What is labelling?

A

A theory of how we classify ourselves and others using labels which then defines that person.

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38
Q

What is self-fulfilling prophecy?

A

A prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true. Due to the positive feedback between belief and behaviour.

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39
Q

What does Becker say crime is?

A

A social construct

40
Q

What does PEACE stand for in the ethical interview?

A

P- preparation and planning - identify key objectives of the interview
E- engage and explain - active listening to promote rapport
A- account, clarification and challenge - using open-ended questions to elicit information
C-closure - giving the suspect chance to ask any questions
E-evaluate - reflecting on the interviewer’s performance

41
Q

Name four things that influence eye-witness testimony?

A
  • post-event information
  • leading questions
  • influence of anxiety
  • weapon focus
42
Q

Name four factors that effect jury decision making?

A
  • attractiveness
  • race
  • accent
  • pre-trail publicity
43
Q

What was Abwender and Hough’s aim?

A

To investigate the attractiveness leniency hypothesis (ALE), that attractive defendants are treated more favourably by juries than less attractive ones. They also wanted to examine whether this effect was dependent on the sex of the jurors.

44
Q

Who were the participants in Abwender’s study?

A

-207 participants
- 129 women
- 78 men

45
Q

What were Abwender and Hough ppts asked to do?

A

Asked to judge the guilt of and recommends the sentence for the imaginary case of a drunk driver who drove recklessly and killed a pedestrian.

46
Q

What did Abwender and Hough find?

A
  • female participants were more lenient towards an attractive female defendant, and less lenient towards an unattractive defendant
  • male participants displayed the opposite tendency
47
Q

What is pre-trail publicity?

A
  • Eg news on TV
  • may have a negative-influence on jurors’ judgements of defendant guilt.
48
Q

Who looked into pre-trail publicity?

A

Nancy Steblay et al

49
Q

What was the procedure of Nancy Stebley et al?

A
  • meta-analysis was made of 44 studies, participants in a mock jury trail or questionnaire
  • negative info was given to an experimental group, ppts were then asked to decide whether the defendant was guilty or innocent.
  • control groups were not given such information.
50
Q

What were the findings of Steblay et al?

A
  • those exposed to negative pre-trail publicity were significantly more likely to return a guilty verdict 59%
  • a number of variables were identified which enhanced the effect (if the delay between judgment and PTP was larger, or the type of crime - strongest for murder or sexual abuse)
51
Q

Conclusions of Steblay et al?

A
  • data supported the belief that PTP leads people to be more likely to reach a guilty judgement, especially related to certain conditions.
  • one possible remedy would be to hold trails that attract extensive PTP in foreign locations.
  • also offer an explanation for the effect of PTP, that is creates schemas in the mind of jurors, the more publicity there is the more these schemas become entrenched.
52
Q

Was Loftus and Palmer a lab experiment?

A

Yes

53
Q

What is cognitive bias?

A

A systematic thought process caused by the tendency of the human brain to simplify information processing through a filter of personal experience and preferences.

54
Q

How would you balance bias in trials?

A
  • jury selection process, measures like the PJAQ where jurors with prejudicial biases are weeded out from the jury pool.
  • create a jury with a representative pool of biases
  • protecting forensic experts from undue influences. Eg using an expert witness not associated with either side of the adversarial system.
55
Q

What is the story model?

A

Proposed stages that jurors go through when making decisions:
1. Constructing a story (impose a narrative based on pre-existing knowledge, expectations)
2. Learning a verdict decisions (very difficult as usually couched in unfamiliar language)
3. Making a decision (involves matching the jurors version of events with what is the verdicts available with the best fit)

56
Q

What did Pennington and Hastie 1993 do?

A

Carried out a mock trial using 16 mock jurors. Asked to carry out deliberations out loud whilst being observed. Developed the Story model.

57
Q

What was Besemer’s aim?

A

To look at the extent to which children of convicted parents have a higher risk of conviction themselves because of the focus on certain criminal families.

58
Q

What did Besemer do?

A

Looked into bias in terms of convicted parent, low family income, poor housing and poor job record of a father. These factors are used to label a family and factors that relate to a ‘criminal family’.

59
Q

What did Besemer find?

A
  • That children from families labelled criminal are more likely to be convicted than children from other families.
  • the greatest risk for showing criminal behaviour was a convicted parent and after that it was social circumstances.
60
Q

How did Besemer obtain his information?

A
  • Police records
  • 411 male participants were consulted
61
Q

What reason did Besemer give for the conviction rate?

A

Official bias

62
Q

What other factors may be responsible for conviction other than official bias?

A
  • economic situation
    -social learning theory
    -genetics
63
Q

What is an ethical issue with Besemer?

A
  • To actually demonstrate that official bias is the causal factor would entail unethical research.
  • Positive levels have been used but can’t be generalised to negative labels
64
Q

What did Ramatour and Farmington do?

A

Looked at gender differences in participation of violent crime.

65
Q

Ramatour and Farmington procedure?

A
  • 118 male prisoners and 93 female prisoners
  • in Trinidad
  • carried out interviews to ask about participation in violent crime and how frequently they participated in.
66
Q

Ramatour and Farmington results?

A
  • labelling construct and parental labelling were a significantly high contributor in female violent crime at 19.2 whereas males, self and parental labelling was the highest.
  • prisoners parents said they were ‘getting in trouble’ and ‘doing illegal things’
67
Q

Strengths of Ramatour and Farmington?

A
  • supports evidence from self-fulfilling prophecy
  • Female and Trinidad, participants not WIERD
68
Q

Ramatour and Farmington weaknesses?

A
  • hard to say all criminal behaviour comes from labelling, eg biological explanations
  • self report, likely criminals lie to avoid blame therefore not credible and valid.
69
Q

Name some factors affecting JDM?

A
  • dialect/ accent of defendant
  • pre trial information, media
  • age
  • appearance, physical attractiveness
  • ethnicity of defendant
  • sexuality
  • gender of defendant
  • Jurors version of the story
70
Q

Aim of Yuille and Cutshall?

A
  • to investigate the accuracy in recall of eyewitnesses to a real crimes in response to leading questions and over time. The crime in this study was a real homicide.
71
Q

Procedure of Yuille and Cutshall?

A
  • initially 21 eyewitnesses interviews by the police.
  • 20 were contacted by researcher 4-5 months after the event.
  • 13 agreed to participate, aged 15-32 and only three were female, ten were male. Victims was not asked to participate.
  • interviewed them at this 4-5 month period after the incident, interviews were recorded and transcribed.
  • used the same interviewing procedure as the police had used on them- allowing them to give their account first and then asking them questions.
  • two leading questions were used.
  • Half the group were asked if they “SAW A BROKEN HEADLIGHT” and the other half were asked if they “SAW THE BROKEN HEADLIGHT” there was no broken headlight on the thief’s car.
  • Half the group were asked about “A YELLOW PANEL” on the car and the others about “THE YELLOW PANEL” the panels were actually blue.
  • Finally they were asked to rate the stress they had felt at the time of the incident, using a tailored seven-point scale.
  • also asked if they had any emotional problems at the time or since the even, such as sleeplessness.
72
Q

How did the researches in Yuille and Cutshall turn qualitative data into quantitative data?

A
  • A scoring procedure
  • use systems of ‘action details’ and ‘description details’ to collate information from the interviews.
  • Description details were split further into objective descriptions and people descriptions.
73
Q

Yuille and Cutshall results?

A
  • obtained more details than the police had.
  • over 1000 details in total compared to the polices 650.
  • police found 392 action details against the researchers 552 action details. 60%police details were action only 52% researchers details were action.
  • found the same proportion of person details, 25%
  • researchers found almost double the number of object details.
  • misleading questions had very little effect on their recall.
  • ten of the eyewitnesses said that there was no broken headlight and no yellow quarter panel at all on the thief’s car- which was correct to identify.
74
Q

Yuille and Cutshall conclusions?

A
  • eyewitnesses were actually reliable
  • hard to generalise
  • eyewitnesses were in fact not inaccurate
  • disagreed with Loftus’ theory of misleading questions.
75
Q

Yuille and Cutshall strengths?

A
  • field study. Real crime, real eye witnesses. Therefore strong validity.
  • great care taken when counting the details. Scoring procedure allowed for reliable findings.
  • scoring procedure also produced quantitative data from qualitative data, requires no subjective interpretation and is easer to base conclusions upon.
76
Q

Yuille and Cutshall weaknesses?

A
  • lack generalisability, one off incident and field study. May be a case of flashbulb memory, which suggests that certain events are remembered in more detail and more permanently, explaining how those who were more involved in the event remembered more details correctly and were found to be reliable.
  • there were some weak points in the scoring procedure. Such as the question based on age, the thief was actually 35 years old and when asked to estimate the age, most eyewitnesses said he looked as though he was early 20s - which was marked as an inaccurate MemoryMulti even though he really did look that age.
77
Q

What was Bradbury and William aim?

A

To find out whether the racial composition of a jury, and the race of the defendant, has an effect on the decision-making process.

78
Q

Bradbury and Williams procedure?

A
  • used secondary data from different studies of juries carried out 12 years earlier.
  • only trials with black defendants were used
  • IV was the racial-makeup of the jury
  • DV was whether or not the trial led to a conviction
  • data was analysed using logistical regression, a statistical technique used when there are only two possible outcomes for the dependent variable, in this instance there was a conviction or not (nominal data)
79
Q

Bradbury and Williams findings?

A
  • juries with higher % white were more likely convict black defendants
  • juries with higher % Hispanic more likely convict black defendants, relationship less strong than with white
  • juries with higher % black less likely convict black defendants
  • black defendants more likely to be convicted of drug crimes then violent crimes or crimes against property, regardless of jury composition.
80
Q

Bradbury and Williams conclusions?

A
  • racial composition of a jury has a significant impact on the likelihood of conviction.
  • suggests out group bias in relation the the judgements applied in criminal cases by jurors as well as in group bias in jury deliberations
  • study underlines the fact that the balance of race is an important consideration when juries are selected as they may have a significant bearing on the outcome.
81
Q

Evaluate Bradbury and William in terms of validity

A
  • used data from real life juries, secondary data from real trials. Increases external validity of their findings.
82
Q

Evaluate Bradbury and Williams in terms of generalisability

A
  • low. All trials were in America so may reflect a bias that is specific to the American system.
  • all defendants were black, can’t be sure this represents the experience of defendants from other racial groups
83
Q

Evaluate Bradbury and Williams in terms of validity

A
  • other characteristics of the defendant were not considered. Such as age, sex and attractiveness, which all play a part in jury decision making. This lowers the studies validity.
84
Q

Evaluate Bradbury and Williams in terms of measure of convictions

A
  • weakness, conviction was simply measured as yes or no. However defendants could have had multiple charges in the same trial, so may have been found innocent on some (even if more serious than the crime they were convicted of) this could mean important variations in the data were ignored
85
Q

Evaluate Williams and Bradbury in terms of application

A
  • has implications in the way real juries are selected
  • in the American system they have a process called peremptory challenge which allows the defence prosecution team to to object to the composition of a jury on the groups that it might unfairly prejudice the outcome. However the so called Bateson rule prohibits such objections on grounds of race.
86
Q

Aim of Pardini’s experiment?

A

To see if amygdala volume causes severe and persistent aggression

87
Q

Procedure of Pardini?

A

Using longitude design, Pardini selected ppts from a group of 503 men who were grade 1. At age 26, he gave brain scans to 56 men. He then did a follow up 3 years later.

88
Q

Findings of Pardini?

A

Pardinin and Raine found that men with lower volumes of the amygdala were a lot more likely to show aggression and violent behaviour.

89
Q

Overview of Yang?

A
  • amygdala impairment in 27 psychopaths + 32 normals
  • MRI scans
  • 17% reduction on the left
  • 18% reduction on the right
90
Q

What did John Massey have?

A
  • at birth variant of gene present meaning John doesn’t experience stresses the same as others. Triggered by abandonment at three
    -striatum enlarged in size
  • amygdala reduced in volume
  • traits of psychopathic personality
91
Q

What did Stockholm et al find?

A
  • That people with XYY syndrome had a significant increase in convictions for all crimes apart from drug and traffic related crime
  • when variables such as education, fatherhood and retirement were controlled there was very little difference differences in conviction except for crimes such as sexual abuse and arson.
92
Q

Jahoda aim:

A

To see if cultural expectations about the effects of the day of birth show in the behaviour of boys born on different days.

93
Q

Jahoda procedure:

A

Studies Ghanaian ethnic group, Ashanti, boys names according to the day they were born. ‘Monday’ boys are placid and quiet while ‘Wednesday’ boys are aggressive and short-tempered

94
Q

Jahoda results:

A
  • looking at records from juvenile court covering 5 year period.
  • nearly 22% of violent offences were committed by Wednesday boys while only 6.9% by Monday boys
95
Q

Jahoda conclusions:

A

Cultural expectations about the boys’ natures and their explicit labels led to differentiated treatment of the boys; therefore the boys fulfilled expected differences.

Psychology (7 decks)

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