Lecture 6: Psychological explanations of deviance and crime Flashcards
What are some of the neurodevelopmental explanations to crime causation?
- Association of Poor Childhood Fear Conditioning and Adult Crime
- There are certain functions of the brain (amygdala and PFC dysfunction) create this lack of fear → people don’t care - Amygdala and ventral prefrontal cortex dysfunction -> a lack of fear of socializing punishments conditioning in children - > Criminality in adults
- Lack of amygdala - need to do extreme acts to feel something
- Think about our experiments and the sensations you had when violating norms
What is the chemical imbalance explanation to crime?
- Hypoglycemia – low blood sugar (another indicator of criminal)
- Dan White, Harvey Milk and the Twinkie Defense
- There is no genetic makeup that says someone will be a criminal (no gene identified)
Freud and Psychoanalysis
- Humans as closed energy systems
- Basic animals with basic instincts from the day we are born
- Driven mainly by 2 drives: Aggression and sexuality. They exist in our unconscious.
- We need to give an outlet to this energy or else your whole being will “explode”.
- All of us are living in a repressed state of our vital energy and we need to let some of it out.
What is Freud’s structural model of personality? What is the Id?
The Id –> Basic Drives and needs (the Pleasure Principle)
* Requires instant gratification, and needs to be fulfilled immediately.
* Entirely unconscious.
What is the Ego?
The Ego –> Restraining the demands of the Id and postponing gratification (the reality principle)
* Rational part, coordinates between reality and the control of the Id.
* Understand we cannot get what we want right away
* The ego is a safety valve - allows some of the water to pass, repress some of the drives. Let some of it pass so that it doesn’t break. Socially accepted and healthy ways of coping
Ie: drinking, sports for agression.
What is the super-ego?
The Super-Ego –> The internalization of societal values (consciousness and morality)
* Emerges around age 4, and continues to develop.
* Internalization of rules, no longer need authorities to tell us the rules.
* This is how society stays functional.
* The super-ego functions as a dam -> build the dam by limitations made my parents, then we eventually internalize these.
Based on Freud’s Structural Model of Personality, how do we get deviance?
- Super ego is too weak → aggression
- Not developed enough, cannot inhibit the Id and did not internalize the boundaries
- Too many urges - Super ego is too strong → psychosis
- Dam is too strict and breaks down because it does not allow for any outlet for the energy to come out.
- Leads to psychosis - lose connection to reality. - Super ego is too strong, but does not break down.
- Form of deviance : Neurosis
- Do not go through a total breakdown.
- Outlet for this = unhealthy behaviours leading to anxiety, depression, personality disorders
What are the basic principles of the psychosexual theory of development?
- People are largely driven by sexual drives
- Erogenous zones: body parts that produce sexual pleasures
- Fixation – getting stuck in one of the stages or moving on without solving the conflicts associated with the stage.
- The first years of life are crucial → personalities are still flexible but then they become fixed.
- Childhood trauma sticks with
What are the 5 stages of development
1) The oral stage (0-1.5)
2) The Anal stage (2-3)
3) The Phallic stage (4-6)
4) The Latency stage (6-12)
5) The Genital Stage (12-)
The Oral stage (0-1.5)
- Mouth is main organ of erogenous
- Babies suck on their mom’s nipple because it is sexually exciting and bite everything for same reason (sexually stimulation)
- Must have their oral needs satisfied or else they will lead to fixation such as alcoholic, obesity, obsession with oral sex
The Anal Stage (2-3)
- Ego starts to develop.
- Adults want kids to develop discipline and control on where they go to the washroom (potty train).
- If this is not satisfied, they will develop anal fixation. Ie: obsession with cleaning, detail oriented, preoccupied with cleanliness.
The Phallic Stage (4-6)
- focus on sexual organs, kids pay lots of attention to genitals. This is a conflict rather than fixation.
- The Oedipus complex (castration anxiety)
- Young boys are sexually attracted to mother. Father is in the way. Afraid father will find out and will castrate him.
- Boys start paying attention to girls and realize they don’t have penis.
- If this is resolved, at age 6, they start to identify with their father and want to be like their father - The Electra Complex (penis envy): the girls are attracted to father and develop envy towards mother. They want a penis.
- Phallic Character: girls and boys that do not resolve this complex. Boys will seek success, girls become sexually promiscuous. Or both can become narcissistic.
- This explains incest
The Latency Stage (6-12)
- Freud believed that personality is fully formed by age 6
- Latency stage is characterized by the drop in sexual urges
The Genital Stage (12+)
- Sexual urges increase again
What is the role of childhood trauma in Freud’s theory?
- Childhood trauma can explain a lot of adult behaviours.
- Criminal activity and Psychopathologies associated with childhood trauma
