Aggressive Offenders' Cognition: Theory, Research, and Practice

Theresa A. Gannon, DPhil, CPsychol, is Lecturer in Forensic Psychology at the University of Kent, United Kingdom, and also works in a practical setting, one day a week, at the Trevor Gibbens Unit Forensic Psychiatry Services, Kent, UK. Her research interests include the examination of cognition in child sexual abusers, rapists and violent offenders using experimental techniques. She is lead investigator on two funded projects investigating the cognition of offenders. One is investigating the existence of offence-supportive schema in women sexual abusers and the other is the development of a pictorial cognitive test for adolescent offenders. Theresa is also interested in public attitudes towards offending populations and models of offender rehabilitation.

Tony Ward, PhD, DipClinPsyc, is Director of the Clinical Psychology Programme at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His research interests include the offence process in offenders, cognitive distortions and models of rehabilitation. He has published over 200 research articles, chapters and books. These include Remaking Relapse Prevention, with D. R Laws and S. M. Hudson (Sage, 2000), Sourcebook of Treatment Programs for Sexual Offenders, with W. L. Marshall, Y. A. Fernandez, and S. M. Hudson (Plenum, 1998), and Theories of Sexual Offending, with D. L. L. Polaschek and A. R. Beech (WIley, 2005).

Anthony R. Beech, PhD, CPsychol, is a professor of criminological psychology at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Over the last 10 years he has been involved in treatment evaluation and the development of systems to look at treatment need and treatment change in sex offenders. He has written widely on these topics and other related subjects.

Dawn Fisher, PhD, is Head of Psychological Services at Llanarth Court Psychiatric Hospital, Raglan, Wales and is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Her current research interests are risk assessment, sexual offenders’ perspectives on treatment, treatment of adult and adolescent sexual offenders and the use of equine assisted psychotherapy. She has published widely in the area of sexual offending.