Program Overview

Understanding the psychology of crime is essential to its investigation. If you're looking to start your career in criminal psychology, or you're already working in the field and want to aim for higher level roles, our MSc Criminal Psychology degree course will give you the knowledge and skills you need.

On this course, you'll get to analyse the criminal justice system with a view to making positive change. You'll explore complex behaviours, such as police interviewing and deception detection, and gain insight into courtroom psychology and jury decision making.

You'll learn how taking a psychological approach, such as through offender profiling, improves criminal investigations, and look at issues like offender rehabilitation and the links between offending behaviour and mental health.

You can study either full or part-time on campus, or part-time by distance learning, so you can fit your studies around your work schedule. You'll also have the chance to customise your qualification by choosing to combine your study of criminal psychology with another of our Criminal Justice Master's courses.

When you graduate, you'll be ready to work with offenders and/or victims within any area of the criminal justice system, including policing, law enforcement, probation and intelligence analysis.

This course is not accredited by the British Psychological Society (BPS).

Course highlights

• Customise your Criminal Psychology Master's degree by combining it with another of our Criminal Justice Master's courses, and graduate with a bespoke and highly specialised qualification
• Learn from an experienced team of criminal psychology specialists in our School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, and hear from industry expert guest speakers from around the world
• Have the opportunity to use our lab equipment to carry out your own research, such as our eye-tracking and VR technology, and crime scene and operational policing simulation spaces
• Be part of our community of researchers by getting involved with our criminology research groups, such as the Collaboration of Forensic Interviewing and the Probation, Prison and Penology research group
• Interact and explore criminal psychology with fellow professionals from the world of criminal justice