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I received a free copy of this to review through the Amazon Vine programme. It's a lengthy textbook and I won't be finished anytime soon. But reading the introduction and initial chapters is enough to discern a profession transitioning through intellectual crisis.
Here are my notes so far.
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"We do have a scientific paradigm for psychology. We know that genes and environment construct brains, brains produce behaviour. Individual differences in genome plus environmental divergences result in non-identical brains, differences which have a measurable effect on neuroanatomy .. and thence on behaviour.
From behavioural genetics we know that the heritability of psychological traits is generally more than 50%. Nurturing differences are often really the consequence of genetic correlations: disturbed parents tend to have disturbed children. Heritability in action. Non-shared environmental effects (eg not family) typically have random and transient effects on psychological traits such as personality and intelligence. Real abuse and damage always excepted.
Psychology sort of knows this and sort of doesn't. There are researchers who know what a GWAS is, who know their way round a brain scan. And then there is the long legacy of pure nurturism: behaviourism, psychoanalysis, attachment theory, sociomoral reasoning, social information-processing theory and so on.
These one-sided plausible-sounding abstractions of commonplace observations have sadly produced neither real insight, reproducible results nor consistently-effective interventions. In many cases large scale experiments using twin studies and GWAS have shown that their conclusions are simply false. Perhaps though this will change, now we're beginning to really understand the etiology of normal and abnormal psychology. Robert Plomin's "Blueprint" is a readable review covering all these points.
All this has additional force in the case of forensic psychology. But who would wish to be in the position of the textbook editor in 2018, forced to straddle competing and incompatible paradigms while maintaining that forensic psychology is a mature discipline on firm foundations, whose professionals can be relied upon in the investigation process, in court and during the follow-on treatment of prisoners.
Forensic psychology has two main aspects: the legal aspect deals with evidence, witnesses and the courts while the criminological aspect deals with crime and criminals. Our textbook starts by reviewing theories addressing the causes of crime: why do criminals offend and what is the effect on their victims? As mentioned above there are many kinds of theory, and they tell very different kinds of story.
Here is an illustrative quote (p. 58, section 2.2.1 - LCPs are life-course persistent offenders).
“The main factors that encourage offending by the LCPs are cognitive deficits, an under-controlled temperament, hyperactivity, poor parenting, disrupted families, teenage parents, poverty and low socioeconomic status (SES).
Genetic and biological factors, such as a low heart rate, are also important (see Chapter 4).”
Of course all of the so-called main factors on the first list are strongly heritable, and therefore have substantial genetic causation which would be captured by a polygenic score (not mentioned in the copious index).
Amazing to read this in a 2018 textbook."
Full review here.
