week four

Question 1

legal issue

Answer 1

1. always be clear on the purpose of the assessment and the question to be answered
2. know the standards of each legal issue being evaluated
3. only include a diagnosis if it is relevant to the legal issue (because of confidentiality)

Question 2

unique considerations of forensic psychological assessments

Answer 2

• who is the client? (the person being assessed is not always the client, might be the court when asked to release report pertaining to client)
• confidentiality (if the person is at risk to others, information needs to be released, but limits must be known)
• informed consent (people have the right to withdraw from the process at any time)
• cooperation (typically in a clinical setting where they consent, they usually want to cooperate)
• may need to reconstruct the pass or predict the future (past= what was their state of mine at the time of the crime ‘criminal responsibility,’ future= risk assessment)

Question 3

bias

Answer 3

• attitudes, beliefs and stereotypes that affect our understanding, behaviours, and decisions
• often implicit

Question 4

bias blind spot

Answer 4

• forensic experts tend to have this
• consider themselves less vulnerable to bias than their peers

Question 5

allegiance

Answer 5

• tendency to produce reports that are favourable to the party that retained them
• “if i don’t produce results they life, they may not hire me again”

Question 6

forensic confirmation bias

Answer 6

• preexisting beliefs and expectations influence the collection, perception, and interpretation of information
• includes context effect

Question 7

context effect

Answer 7

• undue influence of information that should be considered irrelevant to the current legal issue
• ie. gender and age
• emotional context: if there is a crime that brings up a lot of emotion, ambiguous information tends to have an influence

Question 8

forensic confirmation bias: research

Answer 8

• forensic psychology masters students exposed to aggravating context were more concerned about the suspect’s: psychological information, recidivism risk, overall assessment of mental health

Question 9

review boards: decisions

Answer 9

• for things like parole / people found not criminally responsible
• a study of alberta review board decisions show that risk and need factors significantly influence their decisions
• consideration of identified risk factors differs as a function of: gender, index offence (which sentence is being appealed), prior release failures

Question 10

forensic psychologist neutrality

Answer 10

• not part of the litigation (defense or accused) team
• be aware of your biases and triggers (intentionally challenge them)
• the goal is an objective analysis of the situation and person
• results may or may not be helpful to the side hiring you
• focus on the psycholegal question

Question 11

malingering

Answer 11

intentional exaggeration of feigning of symptoms for external secondary gain

Question 12

malingering may present as

Answer 12

• inconsistency between self-report and other information
• naive presentation of psychopathology

Question 13

malingering assessed by

Answer 13

• considering various sources of information
• testing focused on malingering
• validity indices on testing