Forensic Psychology Key Words

Question 1

Crime

Answer 1

An act committed in violation of the law where the consequence of conviction by a court is punishment, especially where the punishment is a serious one such as imprisonment

Question 2

Official statistics

Answer 2

Figures based on the numbers of crimes that are reported and recorded by the police which are often used by the government to inform crime prevention strategies

Question 3

Victim surveys

Answer 3

A questionnaire that asks a sample of people which crimes have been committed against them over a fixed period of time and whether or not they have been reported to the police

Question 4

Offender survey

Answer 4

A self-report measure that requires people to record the number and types of crimes they have committed over a specified period

Question 5

Offender profiling

Answer 5

A behavioural and analytical tool that is intended to help investigators accurately predict and profile the characteristics of unknown criminals

Question 6

The top-down approach

Answer 6

Profilers start with pre-established typology and work down in order to assign offenders to one of two categories based on witness accounts and evidence from crime scene

Question 7

Organised approach

Answer 7

An offender who shows evidence of planning, targets the victim and tends to be socially and sexually competent with higher than average intelligence

Question 8

Disorganised approach

Answer 8

An offender who shows little evidence of planning leaves clues and tends to be socially and sexually incompetent with lower than average intelligence

Question 9

The bottom-up approach

Answer 9

Profilers work up from evidence collected from the crime scene to develop hypotheses about the likely characteristics, motivations and social background of the offender

Question 10

Investigative psychology

Answer 10

A form of bottom-up profiling that matches details from the crime scene with statistical analysis of typical offender behaviour patterns based on psychological theory

Question 11

Geographical profiling

Answer 11

A form of bottom-up profiling based on the principle of spatial consistency that an offender’s operational base and possible future offences are revealed by the geographical location of the previous crimes

Question 12

Marauder

Answer 12

An offender who operates in close proximity to their home base

Question 13

Commuter

Answer 13

An offender who is likely to have travelled a distance away from their usual residence

Question 14

Atavisic form

Answer 14

A biological approach to offending that attributes criminal activity to the fact that offenders are genetic throwbacks or a primitive sub-species ill-suited to conforming to the rules of modern society. Such individuals are distinguishable by particular facial and cranial characteristics

Question 15

Eugenic

Answer 15

A movement which advocated that the human gene pool could be improved by encouraging reproduction in people with desirable traits and preventing reproduction in those with undesirable traits

Question 16

The criminal personality

Answer 16

An individual who scores highly on measures of extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism and cannot easily be conditioned, is cold and unfeeling and likely to engage in offending behaviour

Question 17

Level of moral reasoning

Answer 17

Moral reasoning refers to the process by which an individual draws upon their own value system to determine whether an action is right or wrong. Kohlberg attempted to objectivity this process by identifying different levels of reasoning based on people’s answers to moral dilemmas

Question 18

Cognitive distortions

Answer 18

Faulty, biased and irrational ways of thinking that mean we perceive ourselves, other people and the world inaccurately and usually negatively

Question 19

Hostile attribution bias

Answer 19

The tendency to judge ambiguous situations, or the actions of others, as aggressive and/or threatening when in reality they may not be

Question 20

Minimalisation (minimisation)

Answer 20

A type of deception that involves downplaying he significance of an event or emotion. A common strategy when dealing with feelings of guilt

Question 21

Differential association theory

Answer 21

An explanation for offending which proposes that, through interaction with others, individuals learn the values, attitudes, techniques and motives for criminal behaviour

Question 22

Psychodynamic explanations

Answer 22

A group of theories influenced by the work of Freud which share the belief that unconscious conflicts, rooted in early childhood and determined by interactions with parents, drive future criminal behaviour

Question 23

Affectionless Pyshcopathy

Answer 23

A behaviour disorder in which the individual has no ability to experience shame or guilt and lacks a social conscience. This means they may find it easier to commit crimes

Question 24

Castration anxiety

Answer 24

Anxiety created by fear of losing the genitals or injury to them. Freud proposed that this is experienced by boys during the Oedipal stage of development

Question 25

Pseudoscientific

Answer 25

A claim, belief or practice that is presented as scientific but is not following the scientific method

Question 26

Custodial sentencing

Answer 26

A judicial sentence determined by a court, where the offender is punished by serving time in prison (incarceration) or in some other closed therapeutic and educational institution, such as a psychiatric hospital

Question 27

Recidivism

Answer 27

Reoffending, a tendency to relapse into previous condition or mode of behaviour. A convicted who reoffends, usually repeatedly

Question 28

Deterrence

Answer 28

Providing an unpleasant prison experience to put the individual off from reoffending

Question 29

Incapacitation

Answer 29

The offender is taken out of society to prevent them from reoffending

Question 30

Retribution

Answer 30

Society enacts revenge for the crime by making the offender suffer

Question 31

Rehabilitation

Answer 31

Reform-prisoners should provide opportunities to leave prison better adjusted to take their place back in society

Question 32

Prisonisation

Answer 32

The way in which prisoners are socialised into adopting an ‘inmate code’

Question 33

Behaviour modification

Answer 33

An application of the behaviourist approach to the management of offenders in penal institutions. It is based on operant conditioning. The general aim is to replace undesirable behaviours with more desirable ones through the selective use if positive and negative reinforcement

Question 34

Anger management

Answer 34

A therapeutic programme that involves identifying the signs that trigger anger as well as learning techniques to calm down and deal with the situation in a positive way. The aim of this is to recognise anger and manage it

Question 35

Restorative justice

Answer 35

A system for dealing with criminal behaviour which focuses in the rehabilitation of offenders through reconciliation with victims. This enables the offender to see the impact of their crime and serves to empower victims by giving them a voice