Investigative psychology applies psychological principles to the criminal justice system, including criminal investigations, profiling, and substance abuse treatment. Practitioners may be clinical psychologists, counselors, or neurologists. It helps detectives solve cases involving terrorism, arson, and serial murder by analyzing evidence and predicting patterns of violence. It differs from other forms of psychology in that it often involves working with resistant suspects and evaluating mental health.
Investigative psychology is the application of the principles of psychology within the criminal justice system. The practice of this sub-discipline of criminal or forensic psychology is intended to perform tasks such as criminal investigations, crime profiling, psychological analysis of criminal suspects, and substance abuse treatment for suspects and witnesses in criminal cases. Other tasks within a legal system that are accomplished through the practice of investigative psychology include analyzing evidence and testimony, making recommendations for sentencing, and predicting patterns of violence.
A person who practices investigative psychology might be a clinical psychologist, child psychologist, substance abuse counselor, therapist, or even a neurologist who lends his or her knowledge to law enforcement agencies working on a particular case. Detective psychology provides a scientific method for performing tasks such as profiling offenders, analyzing evidence and testimony, and predicting a criminal’s patterns of violence with the express purpose of bringing offenders to justice as quickly as possible. The term “investigative psychology,” in most regions, has come to encompass all of the contributions a psychologist or social scientist makes to investigations and legal cases.
Detectives and law enforcement agencies might seek the services of investigative psychologists when attempting to solve criminal cases such as those involving serial murder, acts of terrorism, stalking, arson, and kidnapping. Offender profiling in criminal investigations is a significant and often vital step in bringing the offender to justice, because a criminal’s mental profile reveals valuable information about him or her. For example, because of investigative psychology, detectives generally have a much clearer view of the offender’s reasoning, which can prove useful in predicting the type of victims he seeks, the geographic location of premeditated crimes, and all the behaviors that they serve as “signatures” to identify the offender’s work. This type of information made available through the practice of investigative psychology has also proven effective in arresting the criminal activities of serial offenders.
There are some significant differences between investigative psychology and other forms of psychology. Investigative psychologists, unlike private counselors and therapists, almost always work with people who have not sought help of their own accord and who may be highly resistant to psychoanalysis. Suspects may need to be evaluated to determine if they are mentally healthy or if they were mentally healthy at the time they committed a crime. Identifying false allegations, false confessions, or false eyewitness testimony can also be made possible through the practice of investigative psychology.
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