Psychological Explanations of crime

Question 1

According to Eysenck What is our personality?

Answer 1

innate and has a biological basis

Question 2

What do individuals with a criminal personality will score highly on?

Answer 2

measures of extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism

Question 3

What are people with this personality type like?

Answer 3

difficult to condition (train) and cold and unfeeling and it is these traits which may explain their criminality

Question 4

What did Eysenck’s study involve?

Answer 4

2070 male prisoners and 2422 male controls

Question 5

What did the prisoners in Eysneck’s study score highly on?

Answer 5

extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism than the non-criminal controls

Question 6

What did Farringtin find in his review of Eysneck’s study?

Answer 6

only found evidence of prisoners scoring higher on measures of psychoticism

Question 7

What is an issue with the research?

Answer 7

culturally biased. Holanchock studied Black and Hispanic criminals in America and found them to be less extroverted than non-criminal control groups

Question 8

What is an issue with measuring personality through a psychometric test?

Answer 8

Validity,
as is the notion that personality is a stable entity. Most people would argue that personality changes over the years and as a person matures

Question 9

What are cognitive distortions?

Answer 9

errors in the way an individual thinks, which can be used to explain how criminals justify their behaviour

Question 10

What are the two cognitive distortions?

Answer 10

• Hostile attribution bias

- Minimalisation

Question 11

What is a hostile attribution?

Answer 11

A tendency to misinterpret the actions of others, seeing them as hostile or confrontational when they are not

Question 12

What did Schonenberg and Justye (2014) do?

Answer 12

showed violent offenders emotionally ambiguous faces, finding that the participants were more likely to perceive the expressions as angry and hostile, compared to a matched control group

Question 13

What is minimalisation?

Answer 13

Denying or downplaying the seriousness of an offence. This may involve using euphemisms (‘job’ rather than ‘robbery’)

Question 14

What did Pollock and Hashmall (1991) find?

Answer 14

that 35% of a sample of child molesters tried to justify their actions by claiming they were ‘showing affection’ or that the child consented

Question 15

What did Palmer and Hollin (1998) find?

Answer 15

that, when presented with moral dilemmas, convicted offenders showed less mature moral reasoning than non-offending males and females. This supports Kohlberg’s suggestion that lower levels of moral reasoning is a factor in criminal behaviour.

Question 16

What has cognitive distortions proved?

Answer 16

useful in treating criminal behaviour. Through CBT, offenders can be encouraged to confront the seriousness of their actions, and research has found that successfully overcoming denial is correlated with lower rates of re-offending. This gives the cognitive explanation a useful real-world application.

Question 17

What did Langdon et al (2010) argue?

Answer 17

that intelligence may be a better predictor of criminal behaviour than moral reasoning. People with very low intelligence, and also therefore low levels of moral reasoning, are actually less likely to commit crime. Kohlberg’s theory would struggle to explain this

Question 18

What does differential association hypothesis suggest?

Answer 18

that through interaction with others, individuals learn the values, attitudes, techniques and motivation for criminal behavior

Question 19

How might differential associations vary?

Answer 19

IN frequency, duration, priority and intensity

Question 20

What is the process of learning criminal behavior associated with?

Answer 20

criminal and anti-criminal patterns involves all of the mechanisms that are involved in any other learning. (behaviorism: classical conditioning, operant conditioning, social learning theory

Question 21

What does the differential association not account for?

Answer 21

Individual differences. Some people are much more susceptible (easily led) to the influence of others. Therefore the theory neglects to consider the role of temperament and personality

Question 22

What does the psychodynamic explanation of offending see as crucial in explaining crime?

Answer 22

The supereo, moral component of the personality

Question 23

What does Blackburn (1993) argue?

Answer 23

that if the superego (the moral part of the personality) is deficient then criminality is inevitable as the Id (pleasure principle) is not properly controlled and we are going to give into our urges and impulses

Question 24

When does a weak superego develop?

Answer 24

if the same-sex parent is absent during the phallic stage of psycho-sexual development. This would mean that we would fall to internalize the moral values of the same sex parent

Question 25

When may a deviant superego may develop?

Answer 25

if the child internalizes the morals of a criminal or deviant same-sex parent

Question 26

When may a over-harsh Superego develop?

Answer 26

if he same-sex parent is overly harsh. This may mean an individual is crippled by guilt and anxiety and commits crime in order to satisfy the superego’s need for punishment

Question 27

What is another psychodynamic theory?

Answer 27

Bowlby’s maternal deprivation hypothesis

Question 28

What does Bowlby’s maternal deprivation hypothesis predict?

Answer 28

that if an infant is deprived of a mother or mother figure during the critical period of attachment in the first few years then there will be serious and permanent consequences. These consequences included mental abnormalities, delinquency, depression, affectionless psychopathology and even dwarfism

Question 29

Why is the psychodynamic theory heavily criticised?

Answer 29

Freud’s theory is seen as sexist as he focuses on the Oedipus Complex and added the Electra complex as an afterthought. In fact Freud argued that females were less moral than males. This is because males fear castration by their father for moral transgressions, whereas females only fear losing their mother’s love! However, the vast majority of criminals are male, not female. Males outnumber females in prisons throughout the world