Forensic Psychology Key Words Flashcards
Crime
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
Official statistics
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
Victim surveys
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
Offender survey
A self-report measure that requires people to record the number and types of crimes they have committed over a specified period
Offender profiling
A behavioural and analytical tool that is intended to help investigators accurately predict and profile the characteristics of unknown criminals
The top-down approach
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
Organised approach
An offender who shows evidence of planning, targets the victim and tends to be socially and sexually competent with higher than average intelligence
Disorganised approach
An offender who shows little evidence of planning leaves clues and tends to be socially and sexually incompetent with lower than average intelligence
The bottom-up approach
Profilers work up from evidence collected from the crime scene to develop hypotheses about the likely characteristics, motivations and social background of the offender
Investigative psychology
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
Geographical profiling
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
Marauder
An offender who operates in close proximity to their home base
Commuter
An offender who is likely to have travelled a distance away from their usual residence
Atavisic form
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
Eugenic
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
The criminal personality
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
Level of moral reasoning
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
Cognitive distortions
Faulty, biased and irrational ways of thinking that mean we perceive ourselves, other people and the world inaccurately and usually negatively
Hostile attribution bias
The tendency to judge ambiguous situations, or the actions of others, as aggressive and/or threatening when in reality they may not be
Minimalisation (minimisation)
A type of deception that involves downplaying he significance of an event or emotion. A common strategy when dealing with feelings of guilt
Differential association theory
An explanation for offending which proposes that, through interaction with others, individuals learn the values, attitudes, techniques and motives for criminal behaviour
Psychodynamic explanations
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
Affectionless Pyshcopathy
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
Castration anxiety
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
