Forensic Psychology

Question 1

What are some problems with defining crime?

Answer 1

• Crime is historically relative e.g. Homosexuality. People’s attitudes change over time
• Crime is culturally relative as Saudi Arabia has no minimum legal age for marriage.
• Crime is age relative as children in the U.K. Cannot be charged with a crime under 10 as they’re not considered responsible for their actions.

Question 2

Explain the OCS with examples

Different ways of measuring crime

Answer 2

• OCS: records by government reported to and recorded by official figures and been used since 1805. Farringdon and Dowds compared the crime statistics in Nottingham and found crime rates were higher because police recorded all petty crimes whereas other counties didn’t.

Question 3

Explain the VS with examples

Different ways of measuring crime

Answer 3

• collected from the people who’ve committed crimes against them.
• give more accurate representation of crime as the survey eg CSEW is conducted on regular basis
• retrospective so people’s memories can be biased

Question 4

Explain the Offender Surveys with examples

Different ways of measuring crime

Answer 4

• ask people to report crimes they’ve committed themselves
• people can be biased and exaggerate their behaviour therefore reports may be misleading
• can be biased as it may be that only certain types of people committing certain types of crime

Question 5

Explain the American Top-Down Approach

Answer 5

• FBI interviewed 36 convicted serial killers to gain insight into their thinking and classified two groups.
• Organised: intelligent, socially and sexually competent and planned their attacks
• Disorganised: less intelligent, socially and sexually incompetent and didn’t plan their attacks in advance

Question 6

Explain the American Top-Down Approach : four stages to building a profile

Answer 6

1) Collecting information available about the crime scene and victim
2) Identifying the type of crime committed
3) Behaviour of both victim and offender
4) Judgements about possible physical and lifestyle characteristics of the offender

Question 7

Evaluate the American Top-Down Approach

Answer 7

• based on self-report interviews and restricted sample, the categories decided by FBI lack validity and cannot be generalised to the wider population
• More common offences such as burglary cannot be added by profiling as the crime scene doesn’t reveal much about the offender. This means the approach is limited to identifying the criminal

Question 8

Explain the American Top-Down Approach

Answer 8

• Developed by David Canter and uses investigative psychology which applies psychological research to criminal investigations
• geographical profiling saw the crime scene as a useful source of information as the behaviour of offender would reveal info about their everyday life. Some characteristics included in the profile includes type of offences they may have committed in the past

Question 9

Evaluate the American Top-Down Approach

Answer 9

• Canter’s bottom-up is more objective and scientific than the top-down approach. The investigative psychology has recently expanded to include the such areas as suspect interviewing
• It can be applied to a wide range of offences unlike the top-down approach as techniques such as smallest space analysis can be used in crimes such as burglary as well as serious offences such as rape.

Question 10

Explain the biological explanations of offending behaviour

Answer 10

• Lombrosso linked physical characteristics to crime
• Criminals have atavistic features characterised by a strong jaw, heavy brow, large ears and flat nose
• Criminal behaviour came from primitively instincts which survived evolutionary process

Question 11

Explain the biological explanations of offending behaviour in relation to Genetics

Answer 11

•

Question 12

Explain the biological explanations of offending behaviour in relation to Neural

Answer 12

•

Question 13

Evaluate the biological approach

Answer 13

• Biological Determinism as

Question 14

Explain the psychological explanations of offending behaviour in relation to Eysenck

Answer 14

Two personality dimensions:
• Neuroticism-stability: individuals towards the neurotic end of this dimension shown traits such as anxiousness. At the other end tend to be calm

• Extraversion-introversion: towards extravert end are sociable, those at other end tend to be quiet

He added a third dimension later

• Psychoticism: how disposed an individual is to psychotic breakdown. Score highly = aggressive

Question 15

Evaluate the Eysenck’s explanations of offending behaviour

Answer 15

• theory is influential across psychology especially how it combines biological, social and psychological approaches together. However his theory was developed from self Report studies so if lacks validity

•

Question 16

Explain the psychological explanations of offending behaviour : cognitive

Answer 16

1) lack of moral reasoning: kohlberg suggests that the higher the stage the more sophisticated the reasoning.

2) Cognitive distortions: biases in people’s info processing characterised by faulty thinking.
• hostile attribution bias offenders may misread non aggressive cues e.g. Being looked at, may trigger a violent response
• minimalisation is the attempt to downplay the seriousness of the offence. Burglars may describe themselves as supporting their family.

Question 17

Evaluate the psychological explanations of offending behaviour : cognitive

Answer 17

• it is less successful when it comes to explaining the criminal mind. They don’t tend to give us much insight into why the offender committed crime in the first place. Therefore it’s descriptive not explanatory
• rehabilitation of sex offenders is CBT which encourages the offenders to face up to what they’ve done and establish a less distorted view of their actions. Therapy is highly correlated with a reduced risk of reoffending and a key feature of anger management

Question 18

Explain the psychological explanations of offending behaviour : differential association theory

Answer 18

• Individuals learn the values and motives for criminal behaviour through association with different people
• if the number of Pro-criminal attitudes the person comes to acquire outweighs the number of anti-criminal attitudes they will go and offend
• the offender may also learn particular techniques to commit crime.

Question 19

Evaluate the psychological explanations of offending behaviour : differential association theory

Answer 19

1) not everyone who is exposed to criminal influences goes on to commit crime. The theory suggests that being exposed to pro-criminal values is sufficient to produce offending in those who are exposed and ignores the fact that people may choose not to offend despite such influences.

Question 20

Explain the psychological explanations of offending behaviour : psychodynamic explanations

Answer 20

• the inadequate superego works on the morality principle and exerts its influence by punishing the ego through guilt of wrongdoing whilst rewarding pride for moral behaviour.

1) Weak superego: same sex parent is absent during phallic stage the child cannot internalise fully formed superego
2) deviant superego: if superego child internalises has deviant values it could lead to deviant behaviour
3) over harsh superego: individual is crippled by guilt

Question 21

Evaluate the psychological explanations of offending behaviour : psychodynamic

Answer 21

1) methodological issues within bowlby as he has been criticised of researcher bias as what he expected may have influenced the responses of the interviewees. Therefore, it is difficult to distinguish between privation and deprivation
2) assumption of Freud is that girls develop a weaker superego than boys. The implication of this is that girls should be more criminal than boys. This is not supported by evidence as the male to female ratio of inmates in prison as there’s 95%males in prison. Therefore there’s gender bias