Forensic

Forensic Psychology – AQA A-level Psychology Topic Overview
Forensic Psychology applies psychological principles to criminal behaviour, the legal system, and offender rehabilitation. This topic explores how crime is defined and measured, why people commit crimes, and how the criminal justice system responds to offenders.

Key areas of study include:

Defining and Measuring Crime
Problems with defining crime (cultural and historical issues) and different ways of measuring crime (official statistics, victim surveys, offender surveys).
Offender Profiling
The Top-Down Approach (typical of the FBI) and the Bottom-Up Approach (British approach, including investigative psychology and geographical profiling).
Biological Explanations of Offending Behaviour
Genetic and neural explanations, including studies of criminal genes and brain structure.
Psychological Explanations of Offending Behaviour
Eysenck’s theory of criminal personality, cognitive distortions (e.g., hostile attribution bias), moral reasoning, and differential association theory.
Dealing with Offending Behaviour
Custodial sentencing and its psychological effects, behaviour modification in custody, anger management, and restorative justice programmes.
This topic encourages critical thinking about the causes of criminal behaviour and the effectiveness and ethics of different intervention strategies within the justice system.