Cognitive Distortions

Question 1

Practical application

Answer 1

understanding the nature of cognitive distortions has been proven beneficial in the treatment of criminal behaviour. The dominant approach in the rehabilitation of sex offenders is cognitive behaviour therapy which encourages offenders to accept what they have done and establish a less distorted view of their actions. Studies suggest that reduced incidence of denial and minimalisation in therapy is highly correlated with a reduced risk of reoffending and is the key feature of anger management. Heller et al.,
(2013) worked with a group of young men who were mainly from disadvantaged groups in Chicago. They used cognitive behavioural techniques to reduce cognitive distortions such as judgement and decision making errors. Those participants who attended 13 hour sessions had a 44% reduction in arrests compared to a control group. This therefore highlights the
practical application of understanding cognitive distortions in order to treat criminals.

Question 2

Alternative explanations

Answer 2

One criticism of cognitive distortions as an explanation of involvement in offending behaviour is that they are more useful as a way of describing the thought processes that criminals go through after a crime has been committed. For example, minimalisation accurately describes how a person might deal with their feelings of guilt, but it doesn’t explain how they got there in the first place. This is important because it is questionable as to how useful cognitive distortions are as an explanation of offending behaviour. In contrast, Psychodynamic explanations such as Bowlby’s maternal deprivation hypothesis proposed that long term separations between mother and child could have a long- term emotional consequence. One long term consequence of separation is affectionless psychopathy which is characterised by a lack of normal affection, shame or sense of
responsibility. Thus alternative explanations could therefore explain the reasons why offending behaviour occurs particularly in childhood and adolescence.