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The role of evidence-based psychological knowledge in cases of juvenile offending is essential to make appropriate decisions relating to youth who violate legal or social norms, as it carries implications for treatment, intervention and practice. Psychological expert opinions therefore need to meet high formal and methodological requirements while maintaining ethical standards. The purpose of this study is to investigate psychological expert opinions in cases of juvenile misbehavior reported to regional courts in Poland. Juvenile court proceedings concern cases of demoralization and/or delinquent offenses. Demoralization is a legal concept described in the Act of June 9, 2022 on juvenile support and resocialization. This concept was not defined; it was only described through examples of behaviors indicating demoralization. These include the following: violations of the principles of community life; evading compulsory education or schooling; use of alcohol, narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances, their precursors, substitutes or new psychoactive substances; and prostitution.

To reach these goals, court records of juvenile cases in six district courts (N = 253) were gathered and analyzed. A semistructured questionnaire was used to examine the cases in which psychologists were appointed and to analyze the procedures used by these experts for assessing adolescents and their families.

Findings revealed that family judges appoint psychologists both in cases of “demoralization” (i.e. status offenses) and in cases of juvenile delinquency. The opinions were delivered by psychologists who were mostly members of diagnostic teams. Results indicate that such opinions generally comply with the minimal standards recommended by the Ministry of Justice, yet a few problems were observed with the determination of levels of demoralization.

The limitations of diagnostic tools used by psychologists are discussed, and recommendations for future practice are provided.

The purpose of this study is to examine the predictive value of psychopathy features on crime-related emotional states in forensic male patients with offence histories who were mandated to Dutch clinical care.

The study had a retrospective design in which psychopathy features were assessed using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. For each patient, information on the events leading up to the crime and a description of the crime itself were extracted from the hospital record to assess emotional states. These crime-related emotional states were assessed using the mode observation scale. The sample consisted of 175 patients with offence histories.

Multiple regression analyses indicated that affective features of psychopathy were a negative predictor for feelings of vulnerability in the events leading up to the crime but not predictive of loneliness. The interpersonal features were predictive of deceit during criminal behaviour.

This study leads to a better, more nuanced and substantiated understanding of which emotional states play a prominent role in criminal behaviour and how these states are affected by psychopathic traits. This knowledge can influence existing treatment programmes for patients with offence histories.

Several studies have examined the relationship between emotional states and criminal behaviour and between psychopathy and emotions, but less is known about the predictive relationship between psychopathy features and crime-scene-related emotional states.

This preliminary investigation aims to examine the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on patients and staff within a high secure service.

To discern the connection between COVID-19-related distress and multiple factors, the study involved 31 patients and 34 staff who completed assessments evaluating coping strategies, resilience, emotional reactivity, ward atmosphere and work-related aspects.

Results demonstrated that around a third of staff (31.2%) experienced COVID-19-related distress levels that met the clinical cut-off for possible post-traumatic stress disorder. Emotional reactivity, staff shortages, secondary traumatic stress and coping strategies were all positively correlated with COVID-19-related-distress. Resilience was negatively associated with distress, thus acting as a potential mitigating factor. In comparison, the prevalence of distress among patients was low (3.2%).

The authors postulate that increased staff burdens during the pandemic may have led to long-term distress, while their efforts to maintain minimal service disruption potentially shielded patients from psychological impacts, possibly lead to staff “problem-focused coping burnout”. This highlights the need for in-depth research on the enduring impacts of pandemics, focusing on mechanisms that intensify or alleviate distress. Future studies should focus on identifying effective coping strategies for crisis situations, such as staff shortages, and strategies for post-crisis staff support.

The authors postulate that the added burdens on staff during the pandemic might have contributed to their distress. Nonetheless, staff might have inadvertently safeguarded patients from the pandemic’s psychological ramifications by providing a “service of little disruption”, potentially leading to “problem-focused coping burnout”. These findings underscore the imperative for further research capturing the enduring impacts of pandemics, particularly scrutinising factors that illuminate the mechanisms through which distress is either intensified or alleviated across different groups. An avenue worth exploring is identifying effective coping styles for pandemics.

The perpetration of sexual coercion is a complex public health problem associated with many kinds of deficits. The literature has shown that women also perpetrate sexually coercive behaviours. Recent work has suggested that this kind of behaviour could be explained by two distinct developmental pathways. However, this model does not allow the authors to identify how the individual processes social information in situ and may decide to resort to coercive behaviours. This study aimed to investigate the role of social information processing in women’s sexual coercion.

A sample of 125 French-speaking women from the general population were recruited to complete online questionnaires pertaining to dark triad personality traits, emotion abilities, alexithymia and antecedents of sexual coercion.

Results revealed that women with a history of sexual coercion had a significantly higher narcissistic traits score and more emotion regulation (ER) deficits than those without a history. For women with a history of sexual coercion perpetration, correlational analyses showed positive correlations, respectively, between psychopathic traits and alexithymia and between Machiavellianism and deficits in ER.

These results contribute to identifying the deficits relating to SIP in terms of sexual coercion perpetrated by women. Women with a history of sexual coercion perpetration appear to endorse more dark triad traits and to have ER issues. Certain level of these deficits could be a trigger and affect the SIP of women and increase the likelihood behaving in a sexually coercive manner.

The current review aims to focus on how risk and protective factors for self-harm in secure mental health hospitals are captured in the literature.

Fifty-seven articles were included in a systematic review, drawn from an initial 1,119 articles, post duplicate removal. Databases included Psycinfo, Psycarticles, Psycnet, Web of Science and EBSCO host. A thematic analysis was used, which included a meta-ethnographic approach for considering qualitative papers.

There was a clear focus on risk factors, with eight identified (in order of occurrence): raised emotional reactivity and poor emotion regulation; poor mental health; traumatic experiences; personality disorder diagnosis and associated traits; increased use of outward aggression – dual harm; constraints of a secure environment and lack of control; previous self-harm and suicide attempts; and hopelessness. Protective factors featured less, resulting in only three themes emerging (in order of occurrence): positive social support and communication; positive coping skills; and hope/positive outlook.

This includes a proposal to move focus away from “risk” factors, to incorporate “needs”, in terms of individual and environmental factors. There is also a need for more attention to focus on developing high quality research in this area.

The research captures an area where a synthesis of research has not been comprehensively undertaken, particularly with regards to capturing protective as well as risk factors.

This study aims to describe and analyze the differences in the linguistic styles of honest and dishonest stories.

This paper uses a descriptive study with a multivariate analysis of linguistic categories according to the story. The research analyzed 37 honest stories and 15 dishonest stories produced during actual legal proceedings through software Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC).

The authors find that individuals who engage in deception use a different number of words when they narrate facts. The results suggest a need for additional investigation of the linguistic style approach because of its high applicability and detection accuracy. This approach should be complemented by other types of verbal, nonverbal and psychophysiological deception detection techniques.

Among the limitations, the authors consider length of the stories should be considered and scarce scientific literature in Spanish to compare with outcomes in English.

This research highlights the relevance to include linguistic style in real contexts to differentiate honest and dishonest stories due to objectivity and agility to implement.

Understanding deception as a social behaviour and its psychological processes associated are elements that contribute to people and justice to comprehend it.

Analyzing real statements and discriminate differences in linguistic style, contribute to understand deeply this important behaviour to propose new methodologies and theories to explain it.

The present study aims to examine the scope and contribution of behavioural investigative advice (BIA) reports from the National Crime Agency (NCA).

The 77 BIA reports reviewed were written between 2016 and 2021. They were evaluated using Toulmin’s (1958) strategy for structuring pertinent arguments, current compliance with professional standards, the grounds and backing provided for the claims made and the potential utility of the recommendations provided.

Consistent with previous research, most of the reports involved murder and sexual offences. The BIA reports met professional standards with extremely high frequency. The 77 reports contained a total of 1,308 claims of which 99% were based on stated grounds. A warrant and/or backing was provided for 73% of the claims. Most of the claims in the BIA reports involved a behavioural evaluation of the crime scene and offender characteristics. The potential utility of the reports was judged to be 95% for informative behavioural crime scene analysis and 40% for potential new lines of enquiry.

The reports should serve as a model for the work of behavioural investigative advisers internationally.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to systematically evaluate BIA reports commissioned by the NCA; it adds to previous similar studies by evaluating the largest number of BIA reports ever reviewed, and uniquely provides judgement of overall utility.

Stalking is considered a public health priority with a range of adverse outcomes. This paper aims to explore existing literature on children and adolescents as perpetrators of stalking, with a focus on rates of stalking and victim and perpetrator characteristics associated with stalking.

A review of research where stalking was engaged in by those 18 years old and younger was conducted, where 17 manuscripts met criteria for review.

This review found a prevalence of young people engaging in stalking of between 5.3% and 36%. Considerations including demographics, typologies, prior relationship characteristics, stalking and pursuit tactics, cyberstalking and a brief consideration of the impact are given.

Literature considering perpetration remains thin, and future research should seek to move towards a widely acceptable definition of stalking, as well as considering effective interventions for early intervention, and to consider the role of mental health services in supporting perpetrators and victims, who may not always be mutually exclusive groups.

This paper extends previous literature reviews; the authors understand this to be original work that contributes to a gap in the literature.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the literature on information elicitation. The authors investigated the impact of social influence strategies on eyewitness recall performance. Specifically, the authors examined the effect of social influence techniques (Cialdini, 2007) on recall performance (Experiment 1) and conducted a follow-up experiment to examine the incremental effect of social proof on the report everything cognitive interview mnemonic (Experiment 2).

Participants watched a video depicting vandalism (Experiment 1: N = 174) or a verbal altercation (Experiment 2: N = 128) and were asked to recall the witnessed event. Experiment 1: Participants were assigned randomly to one of six conditions: control (open-ended prompt), engage and explain (interview ground rules), consistency (signing an agreement to work diligently), reciprocity (given water and food), authority (told of interviewer’s training) and social proof (shown transcript from an exemplar participant). Experiment 2: The authors used a 2 (social proof: present, absent) × 2 (report everything: present, absent) between-participants design.

Across both experiments, participants exposed to the social proof tactic (i.e. compared to a model exemplar) spoke longer and recalled more correct details than participants not exposed to the social proof tactic. In Experiment 2, participants interviewed with the report everything mnemonic also spoke longer, recalled more correct details, more incorrect details and provided slightly more confabulations than those not interviewed with the report everything mnemonic.

The findings have practical value for police investigators and other professionals who conduct interviews (e.g. military personnel, doctors obtaining information from patients). Interviewers can incorporate social proof in their interviewing practices to help increase the amount and accuracy of information obtained.

This paper aims to present new evidence from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) showing the extent to which obstetric (e.g. abnormal birth weight, confinement at birth, severe abnormality of pregnancy, etc.) and early childhood and family factors (illegitimate child, unwanted conception, family overcrowding, etc.) have predictive effects on psychopathic traits measured later in life at age 48 years.

Data collected in the CSDD are analysed. This is a prospective longitudinal study of 411 London men from age 8 to age 61 years.

The results suggest that none of the obstetric problems were predictive of adult psychopathy. However, some other early childhood factors were significant. Unwanted conception (by the mother) was significantly associated with high psychopathy. The likelihood of being an unwanted child was higher when the mother was younger (19 years or less), and when the child was illegitimate. The poor health of the mother and living in an overcrowded family were also significant in predicting psychopathy in adulthood, as well as both psychopathic personality (F1) and psychopathic behaviour (F2).

These findings suggest the influence of very early emotional tensions and problematic social background in predicting psychopathic traits in adulthood (at age 48 years). They also emphasise the importance of investigating further the very early roots of psychopathic traits.