Course Description
This aim of this unit is to equip learners with the knowledge and understanding of “personality” and “intelligence.” Both concepts refer to broad, powerful attributes of humans that are believed to underlie cognition, motivation, and behaviour in many different settings. The links between personality and intelligence are important and their interest in determining whether certain personality types, or patterns are associated with effective (intelligent) behaviour in significant life contexts. The inclusion of criminological psychology clearly overlaps and complements cognitive psychology in its applications. As crime is a form of social deviancy there is also an overlap with the psychology of abnormality and personality disorder..
Course Objectives
This aim of this unit is to equip learners with the knowledge and understanding of “personality” and “intelligence.” Both concepts refer to broad, powerful attributes of humans that are believed to underlie cognition, motivation, and behaviour in many different settings. The links between personality and intelligence are important and their interest in determining whether certain personality types, or patterns are associated with effective (intelligent) behaviour in significant life contexts. The inclusion of criminological psychology clearly overlaps and complements cognitive psychology in its applications. As crime is a form of social deviancy there is also an overlap with the psychology of abnormality and personality disorder..
Key Topics
- LO1: Understand how intelligence is conceptualised.
- LO2: Understand the classification of theories of personality.
- LO3: Understand the concepts of criminological psychology.
- LO4: Understand offender profiling.
Course Outline
| Week | Topics |
|---|
| 1 | Defining intelligence |
| 2 | Intelligence testing: Stanford-Binet, Wechsler, Army Alpha and Beta |
| 3 | Heredity vs environment: twin (Minnesota), adoption and family studies |
| 4 | Classifying personality theories: nomothetic vs idiographic |
| 5 | Psychometric approaches: Eysenck and Cattell, the Big Five |
| 6 | Applying criminological psychology: age, gender and offending |
| 7 | Theories of criminal behaviour: personality and criminality, Eysenck, Heaven (1996) |
| Midterm | Midterm evaluation |
| 9 | Offender profiling and investigative psychology: Canter’s approach and profiling equations |
| 10 | Situational crime prevention, punitive prison regimes and treatment programmes |
| 11 | Practical and ethical problems in profiling offenders; coursework preparation |
| 12 | Assessment workshop: drafting against the assessment criteria, one-to-one tutorials, formative feedback on drafts |
| 13 | Supervised completion and submission |
| 14 | Assignment workshop: drafting, feedback and improvement |
| 15 | Review and coursework completion |
| Final | Final assessment and submission |
Learning Outcomes
- LO1 Understand how intelligence is conceptualised.
- 1.1 Analyse the similarities and differences between definitions of intelligence.
- 1.2 Analyse the claim that IQ is a valid measure of intelligence.
- 1.3 Evaluate how hereditary and environmental influences contribute to explaining intelligence.
- LO2 Understand the classification of theories of personality.
- 2.1 Explain how theories of personality are classified.
- LO3 Understand the concepts of criminological psychology.
- 3.1 Describe the application of criminological psychology.
- 3.2 Evaluate theories of criminal behaviour and predictors of long-term offending.
- LO4 Understand offender profiling.
- 4.1 Explain offender profiling.
- 4.2 Evaluate the application of profiling the psychology of offenders.
- 4.3 Analyse how situation crime prevention could be achieved.
- 4.4 Describe potential problems both practically and ethical which may be encountered when profiling offenders.
