What's covered
Key facts
OCR teaches that crime is measured in two main ways — official statistics and self-report — and that criminal/anti-social behaviour is a social construct defined by deviation from norms and varying by culture.
Eysenck argued criminality develops when early socialisation fails: children who condition poorly do not learn to associate anti-social acts with anxiety or guilt, so are not deterred from offending.
Cooper and Mackie (1986) was a controlled lab experiment (high control), but its artificial setting (low ecological validity) and the fact that aggressive free play is not real criminal behaviour limit how far it supports the social learning explanation of crime.
Anger management programmes are cognitive-behavioural treatments that teach offenders to recognise and control anger so they are less likely to reoffend, though evidence for their effectiveness in reducing recidivism is mixed.
The OCR J203 spec lists the types of crime students must know as violent, drug-related, acquisitive, sexual and anti-social offences.
Eysenck and Eysenck (1977) compared male prisoners with male controls and found prisoners scored higher on extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism, giving supporting evidence for the criminal personality theory.
Cooper and Mackie (1986) studied 84 children aged about 9-11 (22 pairs of boys, 20 pairs of girls); in each pair one child played and one watched an aggressive, low-aggression or non-video maze game for 8 minutes, then had 8 minutes of observed free play.
OCR's punishment-and-deterrents strand includes community sentences (such as unpaid work) and fines as alternatives to prison for reducing criminal/anti-social behaviour.
Official statistics record only crimes reported to and recorded by police, so they underestimate the true crime rate because many crimes go unreported (the 'dark figure' of crime).
A criticism of Eysenck's theory is that it ignores individual differences: not everyone with a high-scoring 'criminal' personality becomes a criminal, and many offenders do not have this personality type.
Sample questions
A taste of the 46 questions in this topic, answers marked. Sign up to practise the full set with spaced repetition.
Which brain system regulates arousal levels in Eysenck's explanation of extraversion?
- •The autonomic nervous system
- •The dopaminergic neurons
- •The limbic system
- ✓The reticular activating system
Which of these is one of the types of crime named in the OCR Criminal Psychology spec?
- ✓Acquisitive offences
- •Cognitive offences
- •Recreational offences
- •Restorative offences
What did Eysenck and Eysenck (1977) find when comparing prisoners with controls?
- •Prisoners and controls scored exactly the same on every dimension
- ✓Prisoners scored higher on extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism
- •Prisoners scored higher only on openness and agreeableness
- •Prisoners scored lower on all three personality dimensions
Which is a valid criticism of using Cooper and Mackie (1986) to explain real crime?
- ✓Aggressive free play is not the same as real criminal behaviour
- •It measured personality instead of observed behaviour
- •It used only adult prisoners rather than children
- •The study had no control over any of its variables
What kind of treatment is an anger management programme?
- ✓A cognitive-behavioural treatment
- •A drug-based biological treatment
- •A financial deterrent
- •A form of restorative justice
What are the three personality dimensions in Eysenck's Criminal Personality Theory?
- •Aggression, egocentrism and impulsivity
- •Extraversion, neuroticism and openness
- •Extraversion, neuroticism and psychosis
- ✓Extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism
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