Forensic psych definitions

Offender profiling

A behavioural and analytical tool intended to help investigators predict offender characteristics

The top-down approach

Profilers start with a pre-established typology and work down to lower levels to assign offenders to categories

Organised offender

An offender who shows evidence of planning, targeting a specific victim and tends to be socially and sexually competent with high intelligence

Disorganised offender

An offender who shows little evidence of planning, leaves clues and tends to be socially and sexually incompetent with low intelligence

The bottom-up approach

Profilers work up from evidence collected at the crime scene to develop hypotheses about the characteristics and background of the offender

Investigative psychology

Matching details from the crime scene with the statistical analysis of typical offender behaviour patterns

Geographical profiling

Using information from the locations of linked crime scenes to make inferences about the operational base of an offender

Atavistic form

Biological approach that attributes criminal activity to the fact offenders are genetic throwbacks

The criminal personality

When an individual scores highly on measures of extroversion, neuroticism and psychoticism and cannot easily be conditioned

Level of moral reasoning

The way a person thinks about right and wrong

Cognitive distortions

Fault, biased and irrational ways of thinking that mean we perceive ourselves, others and the world inaccurately and negatively

Hostile attribution bias

The tendency to judge ambiguous situations or others’ actions as aggressive and threatening

Minimisation

Downplaying the significance of an event (offence) or emotion

Differential association theory

An explanation that proposes that individuals learn the values, attitudes, techniques and motives for offending behaviour from others

Psychodynamic explanations

Perspective that describes the different forces that operate on the mind and direct human behaviour

Custodial sentencing

A decision made by a court that punishment for a crime should involve time in custody

Recidivism

Reoffending, a tendency to relapse into a previous condition of behaviour

Behaviour modification

An application of the behaviourist approach to treatment, replacing undesirable behaviours with desirable ones using token economies

Anger management

A therapeutic programme involving identifying the signs that trigger anger and learning techniques to calm down

Restorative justice

System of dealing with offending behaviour focusing on the rehabilitation offenders through reconciliation with the victim