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The primary aim of Phil. Lic. (Psych.) Sophia Söderström’s dissertation was to evaluate the effectiveness of the cognitive-oriented treatment programs “A New Direction” for young and “New Challenges” for adult offenders. The 61 participants (n = 30 in the one-week group and n = 31 in the 18-week individual treatment group) in the youth study (Study I) were defined as being in the pre-criminal or early phase of lifestyle criminality, and the 43 participants in the adult study (Study II) were defined as being in the advanced or burned-out phase of lifestyle criminality.

Study I and Study II examined the programs’ effect on criminal thinking patterns, sense of coherence and recidivism. Additionally, in Study II, the aim was to examine positive and negative affect and client-rated quality of program delivery and correlations with client-rated quality of program delivery and criminal thinking patterns, sense of coherence, and positive and negative affect after treatment. The aim of Study III was to examine whether the 18-week and the 6-week interventions decreased the subdimensions of criminal thinking and increased the subfactors of the sense of coherence and whether the decrease in criminal thinking was mediated by the increase in sense of coherence.

In summary, the current thesis demonstrates that it is possible to impact both younger and older offenders’ criminal thinking patterns and sense of coherence with the examined cognitive multi-week treatment programs. The follow-up indicated that the impact remained based on the results, showing a tendency of reduced recidivism for both young and adult offenders two years after treatment. Study II also showed that treatment significantly increased the positive affect in adults and that the highly rated client-rated quality of program delivery positively covaried with the positive affect and sense of coherence after treatment.

The results for Study III suggested that the treatment significantly decreased most subdimensions of criminal thinking in both young and adult offenders. The results also suggested that, at least among adults, changes in criminal thinking can be attributable to changes in sense of coherence and the sub-factor manageability, which refers to the ability to regulate emotions and the locus of control, that measures the degree to which one believes that what happens is controlled by fate (external locus of control) or own abilities (internal locus of control). Especially, manageability can act as a mediator for changes in criminal thinking that may impact criminal thinking and recidivism. Thus, the current work increases our knowledge of possible mediating factors. However, further research is needed to find out what mechanisms enable the client to regulate emotions and enhance the internal locus of control that increases manageability. The current thesis suggests that compassion training in role-play that enhances the change from an egocentric perspective, that is typical for the criminal thinking, to an altruistic approach may be such a mechanism, since altruism can shape and control psychological abilities as the ability to regulate emotions.

Phil. Lic. (Psych.) Sophia Söderström defends her doctoral dissertation in subject "Treatment of criminal lifestyle: Evaluation of interventions based on positive criminology" on 5.5.2023. Opponent Associate Professor Susanne Strand (Örebro University) and Custos Professor Raimo Lappalainen (Ģ��ֱ��). The public defense will be held in Swedish.

You can watch live stream from the doctoral dissertation at: