A03 Psychologists for Forensic Psychology

Question 1

Research support for the effectiveness of top-down approach; customer satisfcation and solving

A03: The Top-Down Approach

Answer 1

✩ Snook found that Canadian major crime officers agreed that criminal profiling helps solve 94% of cases and is a valuable investigative tool.

✩ Positive customer feedback through customer satisfaction surveys would suggest that detectives feel offender profiling is effective in helping with their work.

Question 2

Alison provides contradictory evidence for the effectiveness of top-down approach.

A03: The Top-Down Approach

Answer 2

✩ Alison argues that many of the predictions in profile are ambigious.

✩ Alison gave two groups of police detectives the same profile, but each group was provided with the details of two very different offenders. In each group, 75% rated the profile as somewhat accurate and 50% as generally/very accurate.

✩ This suggests that police are adding meaning to what are ambiguous statements and is an extension of Barnum effect (whereby vague evidence of the crime could be manipulated to fit characteristics of particular type of offender).

Question 3

Evidence does not support the existence of a ‘disorganised offender’

A03: The Top-Down Approach

Answer 3

✩ Canter et al used smallest space analysis and analysed data from 100 murderers in the USA.

✩ The details of each case were examined using 39 characteristics that were ‘typical’ of organised and disorganised offenders. The findings showed evidence of a distinct organised type, but not for disorganised.

✩ Therefore, it appears that the classification of the ‘disorganised’ offender has very little basis in reality according to his findings.

Question 4

Effective in real-life applications

A03: The Top-Down Approach

No Psychologist; real individual

Answer 4

✩ By using the organised/disorganised typology, the police were able to successfully arrest Arthur Shawcross.

✩ He murdered 11 women in New York. The key part of his profile was the belief he would return to the dead victims later to re-experience the pleasure of killing. As a result of this, police set up surveillance and caught him.

✩ This is a strength because this practical application increases validity

Question 5

Another strength of the top down approach to profiling is that it can be adapted to other kinds of crime such as burglary.

Provide research support…

A03: The Top-Down Approach

Answer 5

✩ Merketa reports that top-down profiling has recently been applied to burglary, leading to an 85% rise in solved cases in the US states.

✩ The detection method used for burglary retains the organised-disorganised distinction but also adds two new categories: interpersonal and personal.

✩ This suggests that top-down profiling has wider application than originally assumed.

Question 6

A strength is evidence supports circle hypothesis

A03: Bottom-Up Approach

Answer 6

✩ Canter and Larkin showed 87% of a sample of 45 British serial sexual assaulters were marauders.

✩ This supports the circle hypothesis and the idea that choice of the place of the crime is a significant factor in offender behaviour.

Question 7

Mixed results for effectiveness of bottom-up approach

A03: Bottom-Up Approach

Answer 7

✩ Kocsis et al found that chemistry students produced a more accurate offender profile on a solved murder case than experienced senior detectives.

✩ This is a limitation because despite its many successes as an approach there is doubt cast here over if it is a reliable approach.

Question 8

Successful Application

A03: Bottom-Up Approach

No Psychologist; real individual

Answer 8

✩ Canter used his approach to provide an accurate offender profile for the ‘railway rapist’ (John Duffy) who sexually assaulted & murdered women near railways in London

✩ The crime locations & offender’s behaviour were consistent across the crimes - they all occurred near railways & the victims were treated similarly and was able to find a link between the rapes and murders that occurred.

✩ This confirms that the bottom-up approach to offender profiling has useful applications in fighting cri

Question 9

Contradictory Research Support

A03: Historical Approach to explaining offending behaviour

Answer 9

✩ Goring (1913) conducted a comparison between 3000 criminals and 3000 non-criminals and concluded that there was no evidence that offenders are a distinct group with unusual facial and cranial characteristics.

✩ This challenges Lombroso’s theory that criminals have distinct physical characteristics demonstrating that Lombroso’s research lacks reliability.

Question 10

A strength of Eysenck’s theory of criminal personality is that it has supporting research evidence –> predictors.

A03: Psychological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Eysenck’s Theory of Personality

Answer 10

✩ Dunlop assessed a sample of students and friends and found that both extraversion, psychoticism and lie scales were good predictors of delinquency (minor offences e.g. theft).

✩ Therefore, this gives support and validity to Eysenck’s claims of a link between personality traits such as extraversion and psychoticism and criminal behaviour.

Question 11

How are these findings limited however…?

A03: Psychological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Eysenck’s Theory of Personality

No Psychologist, just a criticism of previous flashcard…

Answer 11

✩ However, these findings should be treated with caution as the sample was students with crimes limited to minor offences, restricting how far this research can support personality as an explanation of all criminal behaviour such as more serious offences like murder for example.

Question 12

Contradictory research evidence for Eysenck’s Theory of Personality

A03: Psychological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Eysenck’s Theory of Personality

Answer 12

✩ Farrington et al.’s review of studies showed offenders scored high on psychoticism but not on extraversion or neuroticism. There is also little evidence of consistent differences in EEGs between extraverts and introverts.

✩ This casts doubt on the physiological basis of Eysenck’s theory.

Question 13

Cultural bias

A03: Psychological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Eysenck’s Theory of Personality

Answer 13

✩ Bartol and Holanchock (1979) studied Hispanic and African American offenders in a New York maximum security prison, dividing them into six groups based on criminal history and offence.

✩ All six groups were less extravert than a non-criminal control group. Bartol and Holanchock suggested this was because the sample was a different cultural group from that investigated by Eysenck.

✩ Therefore, this research appears to lack population validity and questions the generalisability of the criminal personality.

Question 14

Eysenck’s theory does not consider other dimensions of personality.

A03: Psychological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Eysenck’s Theory of Personality

Answer 14

✩ More modern personality theorists like Digman suggest that Eysneck is too simplistic.

✩ Digman’s 5 factor model includes other important dimensions of personality like conscientiousness and agreeableness, those may be more important in criminality, as not all NE personality types become criminals.

Question 15

Reductionist Explanation

A03: Psychological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Eysenck’s Theory of Personality

Answer 15

✩ A weakness is that there is conflicting evidence by Van Dam that suggests this is a reductionist explanation.

✩ They found that only a small number of male offenders in juvenile detention centres scored highly on all 3 of Eysenck’s personality traits.

✩ This suggests that personality is not the only factor in explaining criminality and that other factors must contribute to the offending behaviour in Van Dam’s study such as amygdala activity and social influences such as poverty, unemployment need considering.

Question 16

Further research support for the effectiveness of Eysenck personality quiz –> convicted inmates.

A03: Psychological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Eysenck’s Theory of Personality

Answer 16

✩ McGurk and McDougall gave the Eysenck personality questionnaire to 100 convicted inmates and 100 trade based students e.g. bricklaying and those aged 17-20.

✩ The results showed a high number of people with extravert, neurotic and psychotic personality types in the delinquent group.

✩ Social class was also controlled for –> extraneous variables eliminated.

Question 17

What did Raine find during his brain scans of criminals?

Answer 17

✩ Raine citied 71 brain imaging studies showing that murders, psychopaths and violent individuals have reduced functioning in the prefrontal cortex.

Question 18

Real life applications in treatment of criminal behaviour

A03: Biological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Genetic

No Psychologist, just struggled to remember this point

Answer 18

✩ Potential benefit of research on neural abnormalities is that it could lead to possible methods of treatment.

✩ For example, if low levels of serotonin are related to increased aggressiveness in criminals, then people in prison could be given diets or foods like milk that that would enhance their serotonin levels and hopefully decrease their aggression.

✩ This suggests that changes in diet could be used to help some individuals, showing how nurture (environment) can be manipulated to positively impact nature (biological factors outside of people’s control).

Question 19

Evidence from adoption studies supports the finding of twin studies that there must be some element of inheritance in offending behaviour.

A03: Biological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Genetic

Answer 19

✩ For example, Crowe found that adopted children who had a biological parent with a criminal record had a 50% greater risk of having criminal record by the age of 18, whereas adopted children whose mother didn’t have a criminal record only had a 5% risk.

✩ This demonstrates that there is a strong genetic component in offending behaviour.

Question 20

Christiansen (1977) examined over 3,500 twin pairs in Denmark and identified concordance rates of criminal behaviour as follows:

MALE MZ (35%) vs DZ (13%)
FEMALE MZ (21%) vs DZ (8%)

What do these results show?

Answer 20

✩ Firstly, the concordance rates are low, even for monozygotic twins, which indicates that the environment still plays a large part in criminal behaviour.

✩ Secondly the difference between male and female twin pairs raises an interesting question about the role of gender in criminal behaviour.

Question 21

Research support for neural explanation of offending behaviour –> fMRIs & Limbic System

A03: Biological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Neural

Answer 21

✩ Kiehl used fMRI to study criminal psychopaths, criminal non-psychopaths and a control group of non criminals while they completed emotional processing tasks.

✩ It was found that criminal psychopaths had reduced activity in a range of limbic system areas, suggesting that psychopathic offenders have neurological differences, leading them to experience less emotion that most people feel lower inhibition to violence.

Question 22

Cognitive theories may not be able to explain all examples of offending behaviour, and specifically, not all types of crimes.

Why is this the case, what has been found that contradicts moral reasoning?

A03: Psychological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Cognitive

Answer 22

✩ Cognitive theories may not be able to explain all examples of offending behaviour, and specifically, not all types of crimes.

✩ For example, Thornton and Reid found that impulsive crimes appear to be carried out by offenders with no reasoning whatsoever, whilst middle-class financially driven crimes are more frequently carried out by offender who display pre-conventional reasoning.

Question 23

Research support about minimillisation.

A03: Psychological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Cognitive

Answer 23

✩ Research support comes from Pollock and Hasmall who found that an astounding 35% of child molesters attempted to justify their crimes as non-malicious and simply being a way of showing their affection, whilst 36% did not accept committing a crime at all as they perceived the child as consenting.

✩ This supports the idea that minimilisation may underlie offending behaviour.

Question 24

Research support for hostile attribution bias

A03: Psychological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Cognitive

Answer 24

✩ Research support comes from Schoenberg and Justye who showed 55 violent offenders images of emotionally ambiguous facial expressions and found when compared to a non aggressive control group the violent prisoners were much more likely to interpret the expressions as angry or hostile.

✩ This suggests that misinterpretation of verbal cues is a useful explanation of aggressive impulsive behaviour in susceptible individuals.

Question 25

Research support for moral reasoning theory A03: Psychological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Cognitive

Answer 25

✩ Hollin and Palmer assessed the level of moral reasoning in offenders compared to non delinquents, all were between 13 to 22 years old. ✩ Male offenders showed poorer moral reasoning on 10 out of the 11 questions compared to male non offenders. ✩ This suggests that offenders do have developmental moral deficits

Question 26

There is research to oppose Kohlberg’s moral explanation of offending. A03: Psychological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Cognitive

Answer 26

✩ Langdon suggested that intelligence was a better predictor of criminality compared to moral reasoning. ✩ Langdon found that those with lower intelligence (IQ) and pre-conventional morals were less likely to turn to crime. This shows that Kohlberg’s theory may not be accurate because according to his theory, those who had pre-conventional morals would turn to crime, but in Langdon’s study they did not. ✩ Furthermore, within Kohlberg’s own research (1973) not all of the violent youths had low moral reasoning. ✩ Therefore, his theory does not provide a full explanation of offending.

Question 27

Research support from family studies about learning criminal behaviour from families A03: Psychological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Differential Association

Answer 27

✩ Osbourne and West found that where there is a father with a criminal conviction, 40% of sons had committed crime by the age 18 compared to 13% of sons of non-criminal fathers. ✩ This supports idea that the people you surround yourself with a lot influence your behaviour

Question 28

Research support for the assumptions of learned attitudes of aggression to crime; Social Learning Theory #1 Experiment A03: Psychological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Differential Association

Answer 28

✩ Bandura’s Bobo Doll Experiment - children who first witnessed aggressive adult model then placed in room with bobo doll showed significantly more imitation of physical and verbal aggression that those who witnessed non-aggressive adult model and those who didn’t witness a model. ✩ Shows that children will imitate aggressive and non-aggressive behaviour displayed by adults even if models not present.

Question 29

Research support for link between offending and superego A03: Psychological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Psychodynamic

Answer 29

✩ Goreta (1991) - conducted Freudian-style analysis of 10 offenders referred for psychiatric treatment ✩ Disturbances in superego were diagnosed ✩ Each offender experienced unconscious feelings of guilt and need for self-punishment ✩ Explained this as consequence of over-harsh super-ego ✩ They found that the need for punishment manifested itself among the offenders as a desire to commit acts of wrongdoings and offend ✩ Evidence supports the role of psychic conflicts and over-harsh superego in the desire to commit criminal behaviour

Question 30

There seems to be evidence contradicting Bowlby’s 44 Thieves Study.. A03: Psychological Explanations of Offending Behaviour: Psychodynamic

Answer 30

✩ Lewis (1959) found that maternal deprivation during childhood was not indicative or a reliable predictor of the likelihood of becoming criminal in the future, nor were maternally deprived children at a significant disadvantage in terms of forming close relationships during adulthood. ✩ Therefore, this decreases the validity of Blackburn’s conclusion that inadequate superegos, particularly weak superegos due to absence of a same sex parent, are a reliable predictor of criminality.

Question 31

How has custodial sentencing led to rising recidivism rates?

Answer 31

✩ The emphasis on retribution and the monotony of prison life within Britain has contributed towards some of the highest recidivism rates in Europe e.g. 57% will reoffend within a year after release, according to the Ministry of Justice.

Question 32

There is research support for its effectiveness in reducing recidivism. A03: Dealing with Offending Behaviour: Custodial Sentencing and Recidivism

Answer 32

✩ For example, Shirley found that offenders were 43% less likely to reoffend if they receive skill building and training. ✩ This can help find employment on release, so prisons can be worthwhile if right care provided, thus providing support for custodial sentencing.

Question 33

Research support for differential association theory comes from..? A03: Dealing with Offending Behaviour: Custodial Sentencing and Recidivism

Answer 33

✩ For example, research support from Latessa and Lowenkamp found that placing low risk recidivism offenders with high-risk recidivism offenders made it more likely for the low-riskders to be reconvicted. ✩ This contradicts the aims of custodial sentencing as individuals are learning new techniques for crime in prison.

Question 33

Prison can have negative effects on individual which means that it is ineffective… A03: Dealing with Offending Behaviour: Custodial Sentencing and Recidivism | No Psychologist; rather a Prison Organisation

Answer 33

✩ Prison Reform Trust found that 25% of women and 15% of men reported symptoms indicative of psychosis. This raises ethical issues of the custodial sentencing system as it suggests that prison can trigger psychosis. ✩ This also raises further issues about the effectiveness of prisons for the rehabilitation of the vulnerable. ✩ Therefore, it seems that prison may not work for habitual re-offenders or those with biological/mental illness predispositions to crime.

Question 33

Custodial sentencing is expensive… | No Psychologist; government statistic

Answer 33

✩ The cost per prisoner per year in the UK in 2020 is over £42,000 according to the Ministry of Justice in 2021-22. ✩ As recidivism rates are so high, from a cost benefit analysis perhaps trying different approaches to protect society from offenders.

Question 34

Hobbs and Holt A03: Dealing with Offending Behaviour: Behaviour Modification in Custody

Answer 34

✩ Hobbs and Holt developed a token economy system for young offenders at a residential school for delinquent males. ✩ There was a significant increase in appropriate behaviour in the students taking part in the token economy programme with no improvement in the control group, suggesting that token economy is effective.

Question 35

Research support for re-offending after token economy A03: Dealing with Offending Behaviour: Behaviour Modification in Custody

Answer 35

✩ Cohen (1971) found that a group of offenders who were reinforced with token economy – 3 years later, rates of recidivism went back to reflecting national statistics. Therefore the long-term effects of token economy can be questioned.

Question 36

Research support for anger management. A03: Dealing with Offending Behaviour: Anger Management

Answer 36

✩ There appears to be evidence to support the use of anger management as a method of modifying criminal behaviour. ✩ For example, Taylor and Novaco looked at 6 meta-analyses of AM reporting 75% improvement rates.

Question 37

Ireland: Research effectiveness for anger management. A03: Dealing with Offending Behaviour: Anger Management

Answer 37

✩ Ireland tested a group-based anger management programme. ✩ ✩Self report questionnaires were completed before and after the intervention, and behavioural checklist reports from prison staff. ✩ 48% of the experimental group showed improvement on both measures, with biggest improvements in the most aggressive offenders

Question 38

There appears to be research support for the effectiveness of restorative justice system in terms of £. A03: Dealing with Offending Behaviour: Restorative Justice Systems

Answer 38

✩ Shapland did a 7-year government funded research project and concluded that every £1 spent on restorative justice would save the criminal justice system £8 in reduced offending, however meeting between the offender and victim would require a mediator (a specialist trained in RJ, which is expensive). ✩ Therefore, it cannot be that cost effective.

Question 39

There appears to be satisfaction from victims. A03: Dealing with Offending Behaviour: Restorative Justice Systems

Answer 39

✩ The UK justice council (2015) report 85% satisfaction from victims after a face-to-face discussion with offenders. ✩ Moreover, research from Dignan found that victims were more satisfied with restorative justice than when the crime went through court.

Question 40

Research support for effectiveness of token economies; also used in Approaches... A03: Dealing with Offending Behaviour: Behaviour Modification in Custody

Answer 40

✩ Gendreau and Ross (1979) conducted a meta-analysis of studies on token economies in prisons. ✩ The results showed that token economies were associated with a reduction in aggressive behaviour, a decrease in rule violations, and an increase in participation in educational and vocational programs. ✩ This increases the reliability of the approach because it has widespread application.