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FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY: PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Bowlby (1944) carried out interviews with 44 juvenile thieves and their families. 14 of them could be classified as affectionless psychopaths, and of them 12 had prolonged separation from their mothers during infancy, especially in the first two years of life. Within the non-criminal control group, only two experienced similar maternal deprivation. Thus, maternal deprivation caused affectionless and delinquent behaviour among the juvenile thieves.
- - - - Kohlberg et al (1973) using his moral dilemma technique found that a group of violent youths were significantly lower in their moral development than non-violent youths, even after controlling for social background to eliminate confounding effects.
  - - - a propensity for violence is often associated with a tendency to misinterpret the actions of other people - ie. they assume others are being confrontational when they are not. They may misread non-aggressive cues, eg. being looked at, which triggers a disproportionate, often violent, response.
      - Schönenberg and Justye (2014) presented 55 violent offenders with images of emotionally ambiguous facial expressions. When compared with a non-aggressive matched control group, they were significantly more likely to perceive the images as angry and hostile.
      - Dodge and Frame (1982) showed children a clip of 'ambiguous provocation', where the intention was neither clearly hostile not clearly accidental, and children who had been identified as 'aggressive' and 'rejected' prior to the study interpreted the situation as more hostile than those classed as 'non-aggressive' and 'accepted'.
    - - an attempt to deny or downplay the seriousness of an offence and has elsewhere been referred to as the application of a 'euphemistic label' for behaviour (Bandura 1973). eg. burglars may say they are 'doing a job' or 'supporting their family' to minimise the severity of their offences.
      - Sexual offenders are particularly prone to minimalisation: Barbaree (1991) found that among 26 incarcerated rapists, 54% denied they had caused an offence and 40% minimised the harm they caused to the victim.
      - Pollock and Hashmall (1991) reported that 35% of a sample of child molesters argued that the crime they had committed was non-sexual ('just being affectionate') and 36% claimed that the victim consented.