Psychological explanations of offending behaviour

Psychological explanations of offending behaviour

1. Eysencks theory (PEN)

2. Cognitive exlanations

3. Differential association

4. Psychodynamic explanation

eysencks theory

PEN personality- characterised by high levels of Psychoticism, extroversion, neuroticism

Psychoticism

• characterised by being manipulative, aggressive, irresponsible, impulsive and a risk taker

• Caused by high levels of resorting and low levels of MAO (both hormones)

Extroversion

• characterised by a focus on interaction with other people

• Under active reticular activating system (controls how awake/alert/stimulated we are-part of CNS)

Neuroticism

• characterised by high levels of anxiety, fear, guilt and worry and/or frustration such people may overreact

• Caused by lower threshold within limbic system (the subcortial structures within the brain that deals with emotions, including the amygdala- CNS)

outline how the PEN personality contributes to criminal behaviour

• PEN personality is developmentally immature- so it is selfish and concerned with immediate gratification

• Usually children become less selfish/more socially oriented and more ankle to delay gratification as they get older due to conditioning processes experienced during socialisation

• People with PEN personality are less responsive to the usual process of socialisation therefore, they’d re more likely to act in antisocial/criminal ways when the opportunity presents itself because they have not learned to associate antisocial impulses with anxiety like most people do

evaluate the PEN personality explanation of offending behaviour

cognitive explanation of offending behaviour

Explains by looking at the influence of mental processes and means any criminal behaviour can be explained by faulty thought processes

Kohlbergs explanation of offending behaviour

Evaluate kohlbergs explanation of offending behaviour

Two types of cognitive distortions

hostile attribution bias

minimisation

evaluate cognitive distorting of explaining offending behaviour

differential association theory

Evaluate differential association theory

• supporting evidence- Osborne and west found that 40% of the sons of criminals also had convicts by the age of 18, whereas only 13% of sons of non-criminal fathers has a conviction

• Supporting evidence- wamsley found that 1/3 of the Prison population in the UK also had relatives in prison to- criticism: doesn’t rule out genetic factors as they share gene so cannot be sure the socialisation has contributed to the criminal behaviour

• Can be used to explain all types of crimes- vocalisation only explains sexual crimes, kohlbergs only explains personal gain crimes

• Real life application- Sutherland moved the focus away from lombrossos Activistic form and other theories that said criminal behaviour was due to individual weaknesses and immorality and rather diffuser that criminality is due to dysfunctional social circumstances rather than the inidvdiual- society taking more blame. RLA