Hello, everyone. I hope that you all had a great weekend.
Today’s post will be on, what is Forensic Psychology and what are forensic psychology’s real-world implications?
But first I have some interesting news to share with all of you in the writing update.
Personal update:
The last week was very busy because last week I gave myself a lot of projects to do in addition to psychology lectures and psychology reading that I had to for university, but I love being extremely busy and productive.
But on Friday I had a extremely interesting lecture on the psychology of sexual offending that I was hoping to do a blog post on today but some of the content I believe could be upsetting to people so I think that I will save the topic of sexual offending for my Forensic Psychology book that I’m hoping to release in January/ February time.
However, when I thought about it, I realised that all I would have to do is created Christmas themed stories with the themes of faith, light, hope and family. Meaning that I will not have to create light-hearted stories.
Writing update:
So I had a crazy thought last week after finishing Garro: Heresy and I decided to try and write a new fiction book for Christmas- Garro: Christmas Short Stories.
Originally, I was horrified with myself because whilst I love Christmas. I never thought that I would want to butcher my Garro universe with light-hearted jolly Christmas stories.
However, when I thought about it, I realised that all I would have to do is created Christmas themed stories with the themes of faith, light, hope and family. Meaning that I will not have to create lighthearted stories.
In fact, some of them so far have quite dark moments but following the theme of Christmas.
After that I was more convinced about the idea of a Christmas short story book so I contacted my author network wanting to get an idea if everyone would be interested in helping me promote it; as the idea is to write the book in a way that’s perfect for building upon the other Garro books for my current readers but to entice and introduce new readers to the Garro universe as well.
And the response was very positive a lot of authors wanted to help me promote as I offered them a chance to include a link to their book in the backmatter so that everyone wins.
As a result of so much interest in the promotion, I decided that I had to write, edit proofread and publish the stories this week so hopefully, the sci-fi fantasy book will be available for pre-order by Sunday at the latest.
Currently, I’ve written 15 of the 25 short stories in the past two days so I’m hopeful. As the idea was to have a story for each day of Christmas but I’m going to have 25 short stories, so you have one short story for each day counting down to Christmas.
Make sure you sign up to the newsletter to make sure you don’t miss out on this great book!
Plus, I have a new author twitter account. Just search at @whiteleyscifi on twitter.
What is forensic psychology?
Forensic psychology is the activities of all psychologists whose work is related or contributes to the criminal justice system.
Now, this is a very broad definition of forensic psychology but there is a lot of overlap between forensic psychology and other areas of psychology as in the quest to explain criminal behaviour you need to draw upon the knowledge of other subfields of psychology.
These other psychological areas that are related to forensic psychology include but are not limited to:
· Social psychology as it’s important to know the social processes involved in criminal behaviour.
· Clinical psychology as it’s important to understand the possible effects of mental health on criminal behaviour and the Criminal Justice System.
· Cognitive psychology because it’s important to find out what mental processes are involved in deciding to commit illegal actions.
· Developmental psychology due to it’s to important note if developmental disorders can increase the likelihood of people committing crimes.
Overall, forensic psychology is an amalgamation of psychology work and practices.
In addition, forensic psychology is a fast-evolving field and you can be a researcher and a practitioner.
This fact is very important for research and the great good of the field of forensic psychology as this allows researchers to gain first-hand experience with real offenders and real people. Which this interaction can be used to fuel practical treatment research than is useful to practitioners treating these offenders.
As in other fields of psychology, there is sometimes conflict or disagreements between researchers and practitioners about the usefulness of research in the practical sense and real-world applications.
Within forensic psychology, there are many possible research areas including:
· Gang research
· Sexual aggression
· Firesetting
· Violence
· Child abuse
· Terrorism
What are the real-world impacts of forensic psychology?
Forensic psychology has a lot of real-world impacts as it helps to progress the justice system by:
Improving eyewitness testimony
Informing police procedure
Being able to tell us what is involved in crime
Informing treatment.
Overall, forensic psychology has a lot of interesting and important real-world implications.
I hope you found today’s post useful.
Please sign up for my newsletter to get your FREE book and tweet me at @Whiteleyscifi on twitter.
Have a great week.
Kind regards Connor.
Source: Howitt, D. (2018). Introduction to forensic and criminal psychology. Essex, UK: Pearson. 6th edition.