Forensic Psychology For Dummies (89 page)

Agreeableness:
Kind and warm, sensitive and trusting; being affable and tolerant.

Conscientiousness:
Dependable, systematic and punctual; being well-organised and wanting to achieve.

Extraversion:
Outgoing and talkative; enjoying social situations.

Neuroticism:
Moody and temperamental; anxious and irritable.

Openness:
Creative and original of thought; being open to new ideas.

A number of personality questionnaires measure these five dimensions: some are very short and easy to complete and freely available over the Internet. Take a look at
www.outofservice.com/bigfive/
.

Personality tests can be helpful in many forensic settings because they give you a systematic overview of the person you are dealing with. This can help with treatment or deciding what activities will be helpful to a person as reviewed in Part V.

One major criticism of personality inventories is that they really tell you only what you’d find out from a casual meeting with someone – they reveal what the person wants you to know. To understand people’s innermost thoughts and feelings, you’d need to spend more time with them and talk with them more intensively.

Discovering beliefs: Attitude scales

By
attitudes,
psychologists mean people’s thoughts, feelings or intended actions towards some person, object or situation. As with so many other areas of psychology, questionnaires are the most frequent way of assessing people’s attitudes. Such questionnaires can be developed for specific purposes, such as attitudes towards religion, and also explore belief systems, a common one being the beliefs that people hold about the conditions under which rape occurs, called
rape myths.
So, for example, knowing what a convicted rapist’s attitudes are towards the conditions under which rape occurs can be a crucial starting point in helping him to change his behaviour. (Have a look at the whole process of treating sex offenders in Chapter 15 if you want some more details on how this works.)

Over a century ago William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, said, ‘Because of its ease of use the questionnaire is the bane of modern society.’

Classifying mental disorders

The classification of mental disorders is fraught with difficulties because they don’t line up as distinct diseases like measles or tuberculosis. Therefore, procedures for assessing what mental problems a person has are often used only in combination with a careful clinical interview and information from other sources. However, some major organisations have carried out brave, if somewhat controversial, attempts at the classification of mental disturbances.

Two approaches to classification dominate these considerations:

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
which is produced and regularly revised by the American Psychiatric Association. Having reached a revised text version of its fourth edition, it’s known as DSM-IV-TR. Check out the nearby sidebar ‘The five DSM axes of mental disorders’ for more details.

International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems: Mental Disorders,
compiled by the World Health Organisation (WHO), and now in its tenth edition and hence known as ICD-10.

These classification schemes are widely drawn on, especially in legal proceedings, when the mental state of a defendant can be a crucial issue to determine, despite their authors being at pains to warn against their use in court. They are, nonetheless, used in this way because they give a framework (or useful shorthand) for typifying bundles of a person’s features.

Fitting individuals into the classifications on offer can sometimes feel like packing smoke into boxes. The classifications deal with complex and changing aspects of how people interact with others and live their lives; they don’t identify particular bacteria or damage to distinct parts of the brain.