Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

154 A Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions
in both the Icelandic and Northern Ireland studies. Undoubtedly, the most
important reason why sex offenders report stronger internal need to confess
than other offenders relates to the high level of self-reported guilt associated
with sexual offences. In three separate studies (Gudjonsson & Bownes, 1991;
Gudjonsson & Petursson, 1991; Gudjonsson & Singh, 1988) sex offenders reported
a greater amount of guilt concerning their offence than other offender
groups (Gudjonsson, 1999a). This is likely to make their internal need to confess
stronger than that of most other offenders and is consistent with the findings
of Gudjonsson and Petursson (1991).
In a recent study, Gudjonsson and Sigurdsson (2000) compared the GCQ-R
scores of three types of offender: violent offenders, rapists and child molesters.
Significant differences emerged between the three groups. Child molesters had
the greatest internal need to confess, followed by rapists and violent offenders.
There were also highly significant differences with regard to the perception of
proof, with violent offenders perceiving the strongest evidence against them
at the time of the interrogation, followed by rapists and child molesters. The
finding that child molesters report the strongest need to confess, in spite of
their having the lowest degree of perception of proof, has important implications
for police interrogation: most importantly, it gives the police an advantage. If
sensitively interviewed by the police their inhibition about confessing can be
readily overcome. This appears to apply somewhat less to rapists than child
molesters, although these factors are relevant to both groups. It may be that
the combination of the need to confess and feelings of shame found among sex
offenders explains why they tend to be reluctant to give a full account of their
offences even after confessing quite readily (Birgisson, 1996; Salter, 1988). They
probably reach a compromise by making a partial and limited confession, which
satisfies their need to confess while at the same time minimizing their feelings
of shame when describing the offence.
We have also looked at a number of variables that might be associated
with the reasons why offenders confess (Gudjonsson & Petursson, 1991;
Gudjonsson & Sigurdsson, 1999). These included intelligence, extraversion,
neuroticism, psychoticism, compliance, age, coping abilities, the offenders’ attitudes
and how they attribute blame for their crime. The findings indicate that
personality factors are associated with the reasons offenders give for having
confessed to the police and their attitudes towards having made a confession.
Gudjonsson and Petursson (1991) found that a confession which resulted
principally from external pressure was associated with a perceived inability
to cope with the police interrogation. It is of interest to note that both external
pressure to confess, and the inability to cope with it, were associated with
anxiety proneness (i.e. trait anxiety), antisocial personality characteristics (as
measured by the psychoticism scale of the EPQ and the Gough Socialisation
Scale), age and intelligence. One possible explanation is that the brighter, older
and more emotionally stable offenders are better able to cope with interrogative
pressure than other offenders. In a much larger study (Gudjonsson &
Sigurdsson, 1999), involving 411 prison inmates and 108 juvenile offenders, we
investigated more extensively the role of personality using multiple regression
analyses to identify the most salient variables that predicted the reasons given