Forensic Psychology — AQA A-Level Psychology
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Forensic Psychology explained
Profiling narrows a suspect pool by inferring what kind of person committed the crime from what they left behind.
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The top-down approach starts from a template: the FBI interviewed 36 sexually motivated killers and sorted scenes into organised (planned, victim targeted, weapon removed, above-average intelligence) or disorganised (spontaneous, body left where it fell, socially incompetent), then read a new case against that pair. Canter's bottom-up approach works upward from the data with no types set in advance: investigative psychology mines statistical patterns and interpersonal coherence, while geographical profiling maps offences onto a centre of gravity. Canter and Larkin found 87% of 45 serial sex offenders were marauders working out from a home base.
Biological explanations of offending behaviour: an historical approach (atavistic form); genetics and neural explanations.
Lombroso's atavistic form claimed the offender is an evolutionary throwback, a sub-species whose primitive nature shows in measurable features. After examining 383 dead and 3,839 living Italian convicts he concluded that about 40% of crimes were committed by people with atavistic characteristics: a narrow sloping brow, a strong prominent jaw, high cheekbones, extra toes or nipples, insensitivity to pain. He compared them with no one. Later genetic work replaced measurement with concordance: Christiansen's 3,586 Danish twin pairs gave 35% for identical males against 13% for non-identical, and Mednick's 13,000 adoptees showed conviction rising with a convicted biological parent. Raine's PET scans of 41 murderers found reduced prefrontal activity, the region that restrains impulse.
Psychological explanations of offending behaviour: Eysenck’s theory of the criminal personality; cognitive explanations; level of moral reasoning and cognitive distortions, including hostile attribution bias and minimalisation; differential association theory; psychodynamic explanations.
Five routes put offending in the mind. Eysenck said the criminal personality is high in extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism: an under-aroused nervous system makes such a person crave stimulation and condition poorly, so childhood punishment never attaches anxiety to wrongdoing; he found 2,070 prisoners scored above 2,422 controls on all three. Kohlberg placed offenders at the preconventional level, obeying only to dodge punishment or take a reward. Distortions follow: hostile attribution bias reads a neutral face as a threat, while minimalisation plays the harm down. Barbaree found 54% of convicted rapists denied the offence outright. Sutherland makes crime learned from pro-criminal attitudes; Freud makes it an unchecked id.
Dealing with offending behaviour: the aims of custodial sentencing and the psychological effects of custodial sentencing. Recidivism. Behaviour modification in custody. Anger management and restorative justice programmes.
Prison is defended on four grounds: deterrence, incapacitation, retribution and rehabilitation. However, its psychological effects work against rehabilitation: depression, self-harm, high suicide rates, and institutionalisation, where adapting to the routine makes outside life unmanageable. Around 45% of released prisoners in England and Wales are reconvicted within a year; this recidivism figure is the yardstick for success. Token economies apply operant conditioning, reinforcing target behaviours with tokens exchangeable for privileges; Hobbs and Holt raised positive behaviour across 125 young offenders. Novaco's anger management retrains the appraisal of threat, and restorative justice puts offender and victim in one room to make reparation.
Your focus
- Describe the four stages of the top-down approach and the FBI interviews with 36 killers it was built from.
- Explain the organised and disorganised types by planning, choice of victim, the scene and social competence.
- Explain Canter's bottom-up method through interpersonal coherence, the significance of time and place, and forensic awareness.
Show all 22 objectives
- Apply circle theory to classify an offender as a marauder or a commuter from where the offences fall.
- Evaluate top-down profiling using organised features found in every case and Copson's 3% identification rate.
- Describe Lombroso's atavistic form and list the physical features he claimed marked out the born offender.
- Explain what Christiansen's 35 per cent against 13 per cent concordance and Mednick's adoptees each add to a genetic account.
- Apply the neural explanation to a violent offender, naming reduced prefrontal activity as the loss of impulse restraint.
- Evaluate the atavistic form using Lombroso's missing control group and Goring's 3,000 offenders against 3,000 non-offenders.
- Explain why concordance well below 100 per cent and crime being a changing legal category limit any purely genetic claim.
- Outline Eysenck's criminal personality as high extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism, and why such a person conditions poorly.
- Apply Kohlberg's preconventional level to an offender who says they acted to avoid punishment or to take a reward.
- Explain whether a given account shows hostile attribution bias or minimalisation, using what the offender does with the harm.
- Describe differential association and Blackburn's weak, deviant and over-harsh superegos as two further routes into offending.
- Evaluate Eysenck using Farrington's finding of high neuroticism and psychoticism in offenders but not high extraversion.
- Discuss whether cognitive distortions cause offending or are rationalisations produced after the act.
- Outline the four aims of custodial sentencing and describe institutionalisation and prisonisation as effects that work against them.
- Explain how a token economy runs in custody, from operationalised target behaviours to tokens exchanged for privileges.
- Describe Novaco's three stages of anger management and state what the offender practises in each.
- Apply restorative justice to a case, naming the admission, the mediated meeting and the reparation made to the victim.
- Evaluate custody using the 45 per cent reconviction rate within a year and the contrast with Norway's rehabilitative regime.
- Discuss why token economy gains rarely survive release and why anger management volunteers inflate its success rate.
Forensic Psychology exam tips
Marking Points
- Top-down: an FBI typology built from qualitative interviews with 36 convicted sexually motivated murderers, applied in four stages - data assimilation, crime scene classification, crime reconstruction, profile generation.
- The organised offender plans, targets a stranger, keeps control at the scene, takes the weapon away and is of above-average intelligence, skilled work, socially and sexually competent.
- The disorganised offender shows little planning, attacks spontaneously, leaves the body at the scene, may perform sexual acts after death, is of below-average intelligence, unskilled or unemployed, and lives near the offence.
- Bottom-up: Canter's data-driven investigative psychology, using a statistical database of offence patterns, interpersonal coherence (how the offender treats the victim mirrors how he treats others), the significance of time and place, and forensic awareness, drawn out by smallest space analysis.
- Geographical profiling: circle theory distinguishes the marauder, who offends outward from a home base inside the circle, from the commuter, who travels to a separate area; the centre of gravity and the least effort principle locate a likely base. Canter and Larkin: 87% of 45 cases were marauders.
- Evaluation: Canter's analysis of 100 US murders found organised features running through every case, so the dichotomy is better treated as a continuum; Copson's survey of police forces found profile advice rated useful in most cases but leading to identification in only about 3%; top-down fits only a narrow band of crimes such as rape, arson and ritual killing, not burglary or theft; the original FBI sample was small, self-selected and self-reported.
- Atavistic form: Lombroso's historical claim that the criminal is a genetic throwback to a primitive sub-species, biologically unable to conform, so offending is a natural tendency rather than a chosen act - the first attempt to make crime a scientific question.
- The atavistic features themselves: narrow sloping brow, strong prominent jaw, high cheekbones, facial asymmetry, dark skin, extra toes, nipples or fingers, long arms, insensitivity to pain, plus subtypes such as murderers with bloodshot eyes and curly hair.
- Genetic explanations: Christiansen's Danish twin study, 35% concordance for identical and 13% for non-identical males; Mednick's adoption study of more than 13,000 Danish adoptees; candidate genes MAOA, which codes for the enzyme that breaks down serotonin, and CDH13, linked to impulse control, with Tiihonen's Finnish sample attributing 5-10% of severe violent crime to them.
- Neural explanations: Raine's PET study of 41 murderers pleading not guilty by reason of insanity showed reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex, which regulates emotional impulse; antisocial personality disorder is associated with reduced prefrontal grey matter; Keysers found psychopaths showed a mirror neuron empathy response only when told to empathise.
- Evaluation: Lombroso used no non-offender control group, and Goring's comparison of 3,000 offenders with 3,000 non-offenders found no distinct criminal facial type; the theory carries racist and hard determinist implications that sit badly with legal responsibility; concordance well below 100% shows environment matters; twin pairs share environment as well as genes; crime is a legal category that changes with the law, and what could be inherited is a trait such as impulsivity, not offending itself.
- Eysenck's criminal personality: high extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism, measured on the EPQ; extraverts are chronically under-aroused through the reticular activating system and seek stimulation, neurotics have an unstable sympathetic nervous system and react fast, and both condition poorly, so socialisation never pairs antisocial acts with anxiety. Eysenck and Eysenck's 2,070 prisoners against 2,422 controls.
- Level of moral reasoning: Kohlberg's stages, with offenders typically reasoning at the preconventional level - avoid punishment, gain personal reward - rather than the conventional level most adults reach; Palmer and Hollin's Socio-Moral Reflection Measure found 126 convicted offenders less morally mature than non-offender comparison groups.
- Cognitive distortions: hostile attribution bias, reading ambiguous or neutral cues as aggressive, shown by Schonenberg and Jusyte's 55 violent offenders judging ambiguous faces as angry; minimalisation, downplaying the seriousness or the harm done, shown by Barbaree's rapists, 54% denying the offence and a further 40% minimising its harm.
- Differential association: Sutherland's claim that offending is learned in intimate groups like anything else - both pro-criminal attitudes and the techniques of the crime - and that a person offends when favourable definitions of crime outweigh unfavourable ones; it accounts for crime running in families and neighbourhoods and for reoffending after prison.
- Psychodynamic explanations: Blackburn's three inadequate superegos - weak, where an absent same-sex parent leaves nothing to internalise; deviant, where a criminal parent's morality is internalised intact; over-harsh, where crushing guilt creates an unconscious wish to be caught and punished - plus Bowlby's maternal deprivation, with 14 of 44 juvenile thieves affectionless and 12 of those 14 having had prolonged early separation.
- Evaluation: personality evidence is correlational and drawn from offenders who were caught, so it may describe detection rather than offending; Farrington's meta-analysis found offenders high on neuroticism and psychoticism but not extraversion; Kohlberg measured moral thinking, not behaviour, and distortions may be rationalisation after the act rather than its cause; differential association is hard to operationalise and risks stereotyping deprived communities; psychodynamic concepts are unfalsifiable and Bowlby diagnosed his own sample.
- Aims of custodial sentencing: deterrence, both general (making a public example) and individual (making the experience unpleasant enough not to repeat); incapacitation, removing the offender so the public is protected; retribution, proportionate punishment as society's revenge; rehabilitation, using education, training and treatment so the person leaves better able to live lawfully.
- Psychological effects: stress and depression, with prison suicide and self-harm rates well above those outside; institutionalisation, where prison routine is internalised so thoroughly that independent living is impossible; prisonisation, adopting an inmate code that is rewarded inside and punished outside.
- Recidivism: reoffending measured by reconviction after release, around 45% within a year in England and Wales and higher again for short sentences and young offenders, against far lower figures in Norway, where the regime is built on rehabilitation - the central evidence that custody alone does not work.
- Behaviour modification in custody: operant conditioning run as a token economy - target behaviours are operationalised and broken into small units, tokens act as secondary reinforcers exchanged for backup reinforcers (privileges) such as phone calls or visits, and staff must be trained to award them immediately and consistently; Hobbs and Holt's increase in positive behaviour across 125 young offenders.
- Anger management: Novaco's cognitive behavioural programme, which treats anger as a faulty appraisal of threat, in three stages - cognitive preparation, in which triggers are identified; skill acquisition of relaxation, positive self-talk and assertive communication; and application practice, rehearsing through role play with reinforcement. Keen's work on the National Anger Management Package with young offenders aged 17 to 21.
- Restorative justice: a survivor-centred process in which the offender admits the offence, meets the victim with a trained mediator, hears the impact and makes reparation, used alongside or instead of a sentence; high victim satisfaction reported by the Restorative Justice Council and reduced reoffending in Sherman and Strang's review.
- Evaluation: token economy gains are compliance that rarely generalises once reinforcement stops, and making family contact conditional raises an ethical objection; anger management only suits offenders whose crime is anger driven and relies on volunteers, so self-selection inflates the results; restorative justice has high dropout and an offender may take part to soften the sentence rather than out of remorse.
Examiner Tips
- 💡For a comparison, fix the contrast on the direction of reasoning: top-down reasons from a pre-existing typology down to the case, bottom-up builds a picture up from this case's data.
- 💡In a scenario item, quote the detail from the stem - the weapon was brought and taken away, the body was hidden - before naming the type; the application marks are for using the detail, not the label.
- 💡When discussing offender profiling, ensure you evaluate the approaches rather than just describing them; use the failed dichotomy, Copson's identification rate and the narrow range of crimes covered.
- 💡AQA prints Lombroso as an historical approach, so credit comes from placing him as the origin of a scientific criminology and then dismantling his method, not from listing features alone.
- 💡Attach one number to each explanation - 35% against 13%, 41 murderers - because a named finding earns AO1 while 'research supports this' earns nothing.
- 💡If the stem gives a family history of offending, apply diathesis-stress: the inherited vulnerability needs an environmental trigger, which doubles as your evaluation point.
- 💡These are separable explanations under one heading, so a question asking only about cognitive explanations requires focus on moral reasoning or distortions, not Eysenck, differential association or the superego - read the stem before choosing.
- 💡For application, quote the wording in the scenario and name the term: 'she was asking for it' is minimalisation, 'he thought the man was squaring up to him' is hostile attribution bias.
- 💡In a discussion, explain the requested account concisely and develop evaluation through evidence, correlation and causation, replication and falsifiability where relevant.
- 💡Comparison questions are common here, and the sharpest contrast is behaviour modification changing outward behaviour against anger management and restorative justice changing thinking - build the evaluation on that.
- 💡In an applied item, quote the scheme in the stem - tokens for a tidy cell, a meeting with the burglary victim - name the principle behind it, then say what it will and will not achieve after release.
- 💡Judge every programme explicitly against recidivism; stating 'it reduces reoffending, and Sherman and Strang's review supports that' provides evaluation where a second description of the programme does not.
Common Mistakes
- Describing the FBI sample as representative; 36 convicted killers who agreed to be interviewed are neither random nor a reliable source of self-report, so the typology rests on a weak base.
- Treating organised and disorganised as mutually exclusive categories when most real offenders show features of both, which is the finding that undermines the approach.
- Presenting geographical profiling as a third, separate approach; it belongs inside the bottom-up method because it too reasons upward from offence data.
- Swapping marauder and commuter: the marauder lives inside the circle drawn round his offences, the commuter travels in from outside it.
- Writing that Lombroso proved criminals look different; without a non-offender comparison the 40% figure says nothing, because the same features may be just as common outside prison.
- Reading 35% identical-twin concordance as evidence of a criminal gene, when the same number means roughly two thirds of those pairs were discordant.
- Treating adoption studies as a clean separation of genes and environment; adoptees are often placed in homes resembling the biological family, and any time before placement is shared environment.
- Saying Raine found brain damage in criminals; he found reduced prefrontal activity on PET in murderers pleading insanity, a specific and unrepresentative group.
- Writing that Eysenck said criminals are extraverted and stopping there; the explanation requires the mechanism - under-arousal, stimulation seeking and poor conditionability during socialisation.
- Muddling hostile attribution bias with minimalisation: the bias misreads another person's intentions before or during the act, minimalisation downplays the harm afterwards.
- Reducing differential association to 'mixing with criminals makes you a criminal', when Sutherland's claim is about the balance of learned pro-criminal and anti-criminal definitions.
- Using Bowlby's 44 thieves as proof of cause; it was retrospective and Bowlby made the diagnoses himself, so investigator bias is uncontrolled.
- Confusing deterrence with retribution: deterrence looks forward and aims to prevent the next offence, retribution looks back and aims to make the punishment fit the crime already committed.
- Describing behaviour modification as a therapy that changes how an offender thinks; it changes behaviour only, and that is precisely the criticism levelled at it.
- Calling a token a reward; the token has no value in itself, it is a secondary reinforcer that gains value only by being exchanged for a backup reinforcer that the offender actually wants.
- Quoting recidivism rates as if they were straightforward, when reconviction counts only offenders caught and charged and the figure moves with the follow-up window chosen.
- Treating restorative justice as an easy option, when it requires the offender to admit guilt and the victim to consent, and can be far harder than a fine.