Criminal Psychology Certification Course

Explore how criminal psychology examines the will, thoughts, intentions, and reactions that drive criminal behavior, including the distinctions between crime, deviance, and cultural variation.

Explore how psychology informs the study of crime and criminals, and that crime is an act harmful to individuals and the community, with definitions evolving with beliefs and laws.

Develops understanding of criminal behavior to inform control, modification, and offender profiling. Assists police and investigators, explores reasons behind crime, mental illness contexts, youth development, and reintegration in society.

Trace the origins of criminal psychology from the late eighteenth century, outlining philosophical, medical, legal, and biological aspects and its role as a predecessor to criminology.

Explore five types of criminals—from the ordinary man under external pressures to the neurotic and the genuine delinquent, including groups with mental deficiency—and consider crimes of passion.

Explore how crime arises from both individual predispositions and social and environmental contexts, including poverty, inequality, head injuries, violence, and aggression, shaping risk for criminal behavior.

Identify five explanations: learning via social learning theory (Bandura), biological predispositions, stress responses, social bond disruption, and developmental trajectories of delinquency.

Explore psychopathy as a neuropsychiatric disorder marked by deficient emotional responses, lack of empathy, impulsivity, and antisocial and criminal behavior, with strong genetic influences in paralimbic brain regions.

Explore offender profiling as an investigative tool describing social and mental characteristics, using top down and bottom up approaches to distinguish organized and disorganized offenders.

Examine the assumptions of offender profiling, linking crime scene behavior to traits while questioning demographics, emotions, past experience, and cross-crime consistency.

Explore profiling personal traits and demography to infer offender characteristics from crime behavior. Examine statistical, clinical, and FBI typologies, including disorganized vs organized murderers and four rapist typologies.

Identify offences believed to be committed by the same offender through case linkage, also known as comparative case analysis, a crime analyst method that enhances investigations.

Grounded in personality psychology, case linkage links crimes by consistent offender behavior and inherent behaviors like vehicle type and time as predictors. Limitations arise from known-offender samples and investigator experience.

Explore how criminal psychologists study offenders' thoughts and behaviors, applying psychology to law through roles like counsellor, clinician, school psychologist, and offender profiler; support courts with assessments and rehabilitation.

Linking the crimes of Jack the Ripper in Whitechapel, researchers compare six linked murders by similar behavior, careful planning, extensive cutting, mutilation, and posing, distinguishing them from five other killings.

Explore lie detection as a cognitive and psychological assessment of deception, including polygraph and voice stress analysis, with nonverbal cues, question types, and reliability considerations.

Identify four main types of serial killers - visionary, mission oriented, hedonistic, and power control - and how their motivations shape crimes, with hedonic subcategories lust, thrill, and comfort.

Examine corporate crime, including financial offences like fraud, tax evasion, mis selling of pensions and mortgages, and price fixing, and assess the resulting harms and enforcement challenges.

Explore family crime as domestic violence, physical and sexual abuse, child emotional abuse, and elder neglect in the home, its historical neglect, rising awareness, and new laws and policing.

Schizophrenia raises violence risk and is linked to delusional and hallucinatory symptoms that can drive crime; early detection and cognitive effects like memory and attention influence criminal behavior in contexts.

Hate crime involves offences motivated by prejudice against race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability, including threats, insults, or hate speech online; perception of motivation shapes prosecutions.

Explore the three Goldstein categories—psychopharmacological, economic compulsive, and systemic—to understand how drugs influence crime, markets, and violence, including cocaine, heroin, alcohol, and local drug markets.

Examine cyber crime as a shifting, legally unsettled concept that spans pre-internet offenses adapted to cyberspace, with four categories including cyber trespass, cyber deceptions, and cyber violence.

Combine census, school and business locations, and police crime data to map crime and reveal trends. Use crime maps to target resources and allocate officers, noting surveillance concerns.

Community crime prevention unites local actors with police and state agencies to mobilize neighborhoods and support Neighborhood Watch, a UK 1990s approach debated for outside imposition and low-level focus.

Explore five psychological approaches in criminal psychology: biological, cognitive, behavioral, social learning, and development, and how they explain behavior from biology to childhood experiences.

Hans Eysenck links criminal behavior to personality, proposing neuroticism, extraversion, and psychoticism as nervous-system dimensions that shape conditioning, socialization, and the development of antisocial behavior.

Explore how criminal psychology informs criminal law by uniting subjectivity and objectivity in Anglo-American and continental systems, guiding judge discretion, evidence standards, and humane, fair punishment.

Explore how behaviorism rejects psychoanalysis and links behavior to stimulus and response. Examine its focus on observable behavior, environmental influences, animal studies, and its criticisms and therapeutic implications.

Narcissistic personality disorder is a subtype marked by inflated self-importance, need for admiration, and limited empathy, linking to manipulation and crime, with psychoanalytical psychodynamic and cognitive behavioral therapy unclear.

Examine how borderline personality disorder presents as a mood-related condition marked by affective dysregulation, emotional instability, impulsive behavior, and unstable relationships, with distorted thinking and genetic and environmental risk factors.

Explore the nine hallmark symptoms of borderline personality disorder, including fear of abandonment, unstable relationships, unstable self-image, impulsive behaviors, self-harm, mood swings, emptiness, anger, and paranoia.

Examine antisocial personality disorder, or sociopathy, marked by disregard for others, manipulation, and lack of guilt, and its links to crime and conduct disorder from youth.

Explore how inherited tendencies, genes, and environmental factors shape personality and antisocial personality disorder. Highlight risk factors like conduct disorder, family history, and abuse, with early intervention.

Explore how deviance includes formal crimes and informal norm violations, with positive deviations possible, and how norms vary by culture and time, plus Becker's four deviant patterns.

Learn how eye tracking, developed at the University of Utah, serves as a polygraph alternative by measuring pupil dilation, response times, and reading patterns to detect deceit.