Forensic psychology

• Forensic Psychology


  The application of psychological theory to understanding and dealing with offending behaviour
• Types of offender profiling

  • Offender profiling: top down approach including organised and disorganised types of offender, bottom up approach including investigative psychology and geographical profiling
• Biological explanations of offending behaviour

  • Atavistic form, genetics and neural explanations
• Psychological explanations of offending behaviour

  • Eysenck's theory of the criminal personality, cognitive explanations: level of moral reasoning, cognitive distortions, including hostile attribution bias and minimalization, Differential association theory and psychodynamic explanations
• Dealing with offending behaviour

  • Aims of custodial sentencing and the psychological effects of custodial sentencing, Recidivism, Behaviour modification in custody, anger management and restorative justice programmes
• Top Down approach to offender profiling

  Developed by the FBI's Behavioural Science Unit, based on interviews with 36 serious sexually motivated serial killers, classifies offenders as organised or disorganised
• Organised offender


  • Planned, victim targeted, personalises the victim and controls conversation, aggressive acts performed before death, weapon absent from scene, body hidden or removed, high intelligence, social competence, usually has a partner, skilled occupation, watches media coverage
• Disorganised offender


  • Unplanned, victim not targeted, victim depersonalised and avoids conversation, unplanned violence, weapon often present, body left visible, low intelligence, socially awkward, unlikely to have a partner, poor employment history, little interest in their crimes
• Stages of crime scene analysis in top-down profiling

  Data assimilation, Crime classification, Crime reconstruction, Profile generation
• Top-down profiling only applies to particularly violent, serial offences such as murder, rape and cult killings
• Top-down profiling is based on outdated models of personality
• There is evidence that the idea of just 2 distinct offender categories is lacking
• Top-down profiling tends to be more based on intuition or "hunch" rather than objective methods, which could lead to bias in interpretation of the evidence
• Data analysed from 100 murders using top-down profiling found no evidence for a distinct 'disorganised category'
• The typology classifications in top-down profiling are based on the outdated assumption that personality is a fixed set of characteristics
• Top-down profiling only really applies to particular kinds of crimes like serial murder, rape, arson, cult killings, and tells us little about more common crimes
• Bottom-Up approach to offender profiling

  Data driven, uses past data on similar crimes to build a picture of the offender, developed by David Canter
• Principles of bottom-up profiling

  • Interpersonal coherence, Time and place, Forensic awareness
• Geographical profiling


  A form of bottom-up profiling that examines the locations of crime scenes and their relationship to each other in space to provide insights about the offender's base and likely future targets
• Marauder offender


  • Operates in close proximity to their home base
• Commuter offender


  • Travels a distance from their home base
• There is evidence to support the effectiveness of bottom-up profiling as a technique
• Bottom-up profiling is more useful than top-down as it can be applied to more types of crimes
• Bottom-up profiling provides a more objective and scientific approach compared to top-down as it relies less on the intuition of the profiler
• Both top-down and bottom-up profiling use a nomothetic approach that assumes previous crimes can tell us about current crimes based on similarities between people, which may not always be accurate
• Chi-Squared test


  A statistical test used to analyse the data from the experiment on the effectiveness of the top-down approach to offender profiling
• Each participant in the experiment only took part in one condition
• The data from the experiment involved classifying the profiles as either High Accuracy or Low Accuracy
• The experiment compared the effectiveness of the top-down approach for profiling murder cases versus robbery cases
• The likely outcome of the study

  The top-down approach would be more effective for profiling murder cases than robbery cases, as it was developed based on interviews with serial killers and is better suited to the most serious violent crimes
• Using your knowledge of the top-down approach to offender profiling, explain the likely outcome of the study. (4 marks)
• Different participants were used in each condition of the experiment, which might have affected the results. Explain one way in which the experiment could be changed to control for the problem of using different participants in each condition. (4 marks)
• Biological explanations of offending behaviour

  Assume there is something different about the person who commits crime. Their physiology is different, and this sets them apart from non-offenders, these differences make offending more likely.
• 3 main biological explanations

  • Atavistic form
  • Genetic explanations
  • Neural explanations
• Atavistic form


  The historical approach to explaining offending
• Lombroso's theory


  • Criminals were 'genetic throwbacks', a primitive subspecies who were biologically different from the rest of the non-offending population
  • Criminals possessed similar features to lower primates and these features could explain their criminality
  • Criminals were less evolved, this less evolved form is what he referred to as the 'atavistic form'
• Atavistic characteristics


  • Narrow, sloping brow
  • Strong, prominent jaw
  • High cheekbones
  • Facial asymmetry
  • Dark skin
  • Extra toes, nipples or fingers
• Lombroso's linking of specific features to specific crimes

  • Murderers - bloodshot eyes, curly hair and long ears
  • Sexual deviants - glinting eyes, fleshy lips and projecting ears
  • Fraud - thin and 'reedy' lips
• Other criminal characteristics


  • Insensitivity to pain
  • Use of criminal slang
  • Unemployment
  • Tattoos
• Lombroso's theory had methodological issues, scientific racism, and gender bias