Revision. Psychology Yochelson and Samenow Criminal thinking patterns

Aim
This research is reported in a book rather than a journal article and is an account of the authors work with mentally ill offenders. The authors claim that it is possible to describe thinking patterns that are common to such offenders.

Method
Interviews

Participants
255 male offenders resident in a psychiatric hospital in the USA. They had been judged either not guilty by reasons of insanity or incompetent to stand trial or had been referred to the authors by agencies such as the courts, probation services or social services.




Procedure
Each offender was interviewed a number of times as part of the treatment they received in hospital. These interviews were conducted by the authors and were Freudian in nature. These were not standardised interviews and this research could be regarded as a large collection of case studies.

Results
The authors suggest that criminals have quite distinct and erroneous thinking patterns that different them from non criminals. They conclude that they are essentially in control of their lives of their lives and their criminality is a result of choices made from an early age. Further, they suggest that offenders have cognitive processes which lead to a distorted self image and result not only in criminal choices but also in denial of responsibility. They describe the criminal personality as characterised by 40 thinking errors which fall into three broad categories:
1)Criminal thinking patterns which are characterised by fear and, simultaneously a need for power and control: other features in the category include a search for perfection, lying and inconsistencies or fragmentation of thinking and a lack time perspective
2)automatic thinking errors which include lack of empathy and trust, a failure to accept obligations, a secretive communication style and a perception of themselves as the victim.
3)Crime related thinking errors which include optimistic fantasying about specific criminal acts with no regard to deterrent factors; this also includes an unrealistic sense of invulnerability.
The authors suggest therefore that criminals are not necessarily impulsive that they have planned and fantasised about their actions and that it is these thinking patterns which need to be confronted in treatment. Ychelson and Samenow claim high success rates in getting offenders to accept that they have a criminal personality and in changing their thinking patterns.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• A2
• Psychology
• revision
• yochelson
• and
• samenow
• criminal
• thinking
• patterns
• crime
• OCR

[dannyc0d]

what book are your reading from?

[HannurrSpannurr]

I'm not sure, I gave the book back to school and can't remember what it was called. I'll try and find out for you.

[BlahLisaa]

i think thatt offender profiling would be good one to do as i find that tricky

have you studied john duffy

i get confused on that one

[HannurrSpannurr]

Yes we have looked at john duffy :D

[BlahLisaa]

can you do some more? maybe on kilpatrick or riordan?

[HannurrSpannurr]

I will be doing some more, hopefully this weekend but, unfortunately we haven't looked at any of those studies in my course. If there's a particular topic ( offender profiling, testimony etc...) that you want me to do I'll tell you what studies I've looked at and make one that we're both familiar with, if thats ok?

x

[parafleet]

@parafleet I read "Inside the Criminal Mind" again and I liked it this time. Perhaps I was being a criminal when I hated it. Great book. Very helpful.

[JackalFeatures]

Wouldn't interviews be the measure though?

[Lillogambino]

@dannyc0d It most likely was from "The criminal personality" by yolchelson and samenow

[YummyCookieOfCourse]

if you cant read then stop reading and say it in your own words. :) it would be much more beneficial for your revision aswell as for your audience. Dont overload our neurons with dry facts. add something interesting to it so that the info is memorable and is more likely to be absorbed by our thick heads. :)

Aslo quit the editing software you are using. :)

ps. i liked the video as i think this is the only A2 Psychology revision source from YT. :)

[swampdonkeyf]

The amount of verbal mistakes you have made on this video is beyond frustrating,.. Seriously, what the fuck?

[swampdonkeyf]

Do you read often?

[parafleet]

Samenow sucks. He is the type of person that would teach apple-eating for 16 hours and, when asked about orange-eating, would reply: But there are no oranges. My studies say there are no oranges. There are apples. If you would like, I will teach you how to eat an apple. But don't go on thinking about oranges because oranges don't exist. NOW PABLUM!

[jamespugh1111]

LOL at her fantasising about rape

[Lillogambino]

@dannyc0d "The criminal personality"

[NeroBNiv]

@HannurrSpannurr If you are referring to the books co-authored by Yochelson and Samenow, there are three of them. "The Criminal Personality: Volumes I, II, and III"