Exam (elaborations)
forensics 16,8 and 6 marker questions and answers
- Module
- Forensics psychology
- Institution
- AQA
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Describe and evaluate neural mechanisms as a cause for criminality (16 marks)6 marks - description
- The role of dopamine and serotonin
10 marks - evaluation
- The studies and whether they support
- The studies being evaluated
- All of these studies are on aggressive crime and some criminals aren’t
physically harming the victim e.g psychologically harming them, burglary,
pickpocketing etc. Also it suggests that when there is a lack of serotonin
There are two types of neurotransmitters that are said to be involved in criminality.
When there is a low level of serotonin in our prefrontal cortex it suggests that we
have a lack of impulse control as the prefrontal cortex controls our planning,
reading and impulse control. And because serotonin manages this, if there was a
lack of it, there would be less control.
One strength of this hypothesis is that Brown et al did a study of people who had
high aggression levels and specific traits of a criminal. He looked at their
cerebrospinal fluid and found that these people had low amounts of serotonin left
as a product in the brain. This supports the idea that having low quantities of
serotonin may result in impulsive behaviour of aggression. This was a lab study
and therefore variables were considerably controlled. This means that you could
easily replicate this study. Although demand characteristics could arise and the
validity may be disrupted as some PPE may find out the purpose of the study and
manipulate the results. Therefore this is a weakness and you can’t apply it in real
world applications.
Another study that supports this hypothesis is that another study by Mann et al
looked at 35 healthy adult volunteers and gave them a drug called dexfenfluramine
which would decrease the rate of serotonin. The findings illustrated that only
males had high intensities of hostility and aggression when taking the drug. One
weakness of this study is that it is extremely gender biassed. Which suggests that
higher levels of aggression are only visible in men. Furthermore the sample size is
very small so it is hard to make generalisations and also they volunteered which
suggests their could be PPE biassed which makes this sample less representative
of the whole population.
One weakness of this hypothesis is that there was a study on how the idea of
alcohol consumption may interpret serotonin levels as it changes your metabolism.
Suggests that there’s a correlation between alcohol consumption and criminal
behaviour. However one weakness is that this is just a correlational relationship
and therefore there are other factors e.g depression can cause alcohol
consumption to increase and also because depression is also caused by low levels
of serotonin, it could confuse the problem.
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