Cognitive distortions: differences among sexual abusers, violent criminals, and a control group

Through a transaction research of the descriptive-comparative type, the exploration, description and comparison of the variable of cognitive distortions was proposed as the objective of this study, to be in three different groups: men convicted for sexual offenses against minors, violent non-sexual criminals, and individuals with no history of deprivation of liberty in prison facilities. For the assessment of the study variable, the Cognitive Scale was translated and adapted into Spanish and subsequently applied to 149 males between the ages of 18 through 57 years. The main results obtained make it evident that even where no significant differences exist at a general level in the variable, the group of sex off enders exhibited distortions associated with both justification and minimization of the criminal act. And, this being deemed to be a surprising result, the comparison group showed a higher presence of cognitive distortions than the sets of imprisoned individuals. Finally, resorting to other evaluation methods has been suggested in order to be able to identify in a prison population, through a spoken account, the cognitive distortions that might overlap with conventional measurement techniques that are answered in terms of acquiescence.