Upcoming trainings: Assessment; personal injury; sexual violence; ethics in diagnosis

If you are planning to be in or around Florida, New Jersey, Hawaii or London over the next few months, here are some recommended forensic trainings on the horizon:

April 19 and onwards: Sexual violence workshops (London) 

Building on the success of the 2011 sexual violence workshops sponsored by the British Psychological Society (at which I spoke), Middlesex University is hosting another round of BPS-sponsored workshops on various aspects of sexual violence. Multiple-perpetrator rape is the topic of the first workshop, coming right up on April 19. (Also check out the new book, the first-ever text on this topic.) Next up are a June 27 workshop on "negotiating ethical sexual relationships," a Sept. 17 workshop on "intersectionality and sexual violence," and a fourth workshop on the investigation and prosecution of rape (date yet to be decided). All the workshops will be held at Middlesex University's Hendon Campus. More details are HERE.

April 20: Assessing Emotional Damages in Personal Injury and Employment Discrimination Cases (New Jersey)

William Foote, president of the American Psychology-Law Society (APA Division 41), will be presenting a five-stage model for assessing psychological damages in personal injury and workplace discrimination cases at the spring conference of the New Jersey Psychological Association. To find out more about this all-day training, click HERE.

May 3-5: New Directions in Forensic and Clinical Assessment (Florida)

Many big names in forensic psychology will descend upon Miami for this training sponsored by Division 42 (Psychologists in Independent Practice) of the American Psychological Association. The three-day conference will feature trainings on risk assessment, malingering, trial consultation, the DSM-5, intellectual disability, and much more. Information and registration can be found HERE. 


July 31: Controversial Psychiatric Diagnoses in Legal Settings (Hawaii) 

Yours truly is the trainer at this all-day continuing education workshop at the American Psychological Association's annual conference, along Honolulu's idyllic Waikiki Beach. I will focus on the scientific and practical limits of psychiatric diagnoses in forensic cases, and provide ethics guidance on how to present diagnostic testimony in court. Details are HERE; I'd love to see you there!

Remarkable experiment proves pull of adversarial allegiance

 Psychologists' scoring of forensic tools depends on which side they believe has hired them

A brilliant experiment has proven that adversarial pressures skew forensic psychologists' scoring of supposedly objective risk assessment tests, and that this "adversarial allegiance" is not due to selection bias, or preexisting differences among evaluators.

The researchers duped about 100 experienced forensic psychologists into believing they were part of a large-scale forensic case consultation at the behest of either a public defender service or a specialized prosecution unit. After two days of formal training by recognized experts on two widely used forensic instruments -- the Psychopathy Checklist-R (PCL-R) and the Static-99R -- the psychologists were paid $400 to spend a third day reviewing cases and scoring subjects. The National Science Foundation picked up the $40,000 tab.

Unbeknownst to them, the psychologists were all looking at the same set of four cases. But they were "primed" to consider the case from either a defense or prosecution point of view by a research confederate, an actual attorney who pretended to work on a Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) unit. In his defense attorney guise, the confederate made mildly partisan but realistic statements such as "We try to help the court understand that ... not every sex offender really poses a high risk of reoffending." In his prosecutor role, he said, "We try to help the court understand that the offenders we bring to trial are a select group [who] are more likely than other sex offenders to reoffend." In both conditions, he hinted at future work opportunities if the consultation went well. 

The deception was so cunning that only four astute participants smelled a rat; their data were discarded.

As expected, the adversarial allegiance effect was stronger for the PCL-R, which is more subjectively scored. (Evaluators must decide, for example, whether a subject is "glib" or "superficially charming.") Scoring differences on the Static-99R only reached statistical significance in one out of the four cases.

The groundbreaking research, to be published in the journal Psychological Science, echoes previous findings by the same group regarding partisan bias in actual court cases. But by conducting a true experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to either a defense or prosecution condition, the researchers could rule out selection bias as a cause. In other words, the adversarial allegiance bias cannot be solely due to attorneys shopping around for simpatico experts, as the experimental participants were randomly assigned and had no group differences in their attitudes about civil commitment laws for sex offenders.

Sexually Violent Predator cases are an excellent arena for studying adversarial allegiance, because the typical case boils down to a "battle of the experts." Often, the only witnesses are psychologists, all of whom have reviewed essentially the same material but have differing interpretations about mental disorder and risk. In actual cases, the researchers note, the adversarial pressures are far higher than in this experiment:

"This evidence of allegiance was particularly striking because our experimental manipulation was less powerful than experts are likely to encounter in most real cases. For example, our participating experts spent only 15 minutes with the retaining attorney, whereas experts in the field may have extensive contact with retaining attorneys over weeks or months. Our experts formed opinions based on files only, which were identical across opposing experts. But experts in the field may elicit different information by seeking different collateral sources or interviewing offenders in different ways. Therefore, the pull toward allegiance in this study was relatively weak compared to the pull typical of most cases in the field. So the large group differences provide compelling evidence for adversarial allegiance."

This is just the latest in a series of stunning findings by this team of psychologists led by Daniel Murrie of the University of Virginia and Marcus Boccaccini of Sam Houston University on an allegiance bias among psychologists. The tendency of experts to skew data to fit the side who retains them should come as no big surprise. After all, it is consistent with 2009 findings by the National Academies of Science calling into question the reliability of all types of forensic science evidence, including supposedly more objective techniques such as DNA typing and fingerprint analysis.

Although the group's findings have heretofore been published only in academic journals and have found a limited audience outside of the profession, this might change. A Huffington Post blogger, Wray Herbert, has published a piece on the current findings, which he called "disturbing." And I predict more public interest if and when mainstream journalists and science writers learn of this extraordinary line of research.

In the latest study, Murrie and Boccaccini conducted follow-up analyses to determine how often matched pairs of experts differed in the expected direction. On the three cases in which clear allegiance effects showed up in PCL-R scoring, more than one-fourth of score pairings had differences of more than six points in the expected direction. Six points equates to about two standard errors of measurement (SEM's), which should  happen by chance in only 2 percent of cases. A similar, albeit milder, effect was found with the Static-99R.

Adversarial allegiance effects might be even stronger in less structured assessment contexts, the researchers warn. For example, clinical diagnoses and assessments of emotional injuries involve even more subjective judgment than scoring of the Static-99 or PCL-R.

But ... WHICH psychologists?!

For me, this study raised a tantalizing question: Since only some of the psychologists succumbed to the allegiance effect, what distinguished those who were swayed by the partisan pressures from those who were not?

The short answer is, "Who knows?"

The researchers told me that they ran all kinds of post-hoc analyses in an effort to answer this question, and could not find a smoking gun. As in a previous research project that I blogged about, they did find evidence for individual differences in scoring of the PCL-R, with some evaluators assigning higher scores than others across all cases. However, they found nothing about individual evaluators that would explain susceptibility to adversarial allegiance. Likewise, the allegiance effect could not be attributed to a handful of grossly biased experts in the mix.

In fact, although score differences tended to go in the expected direction -- with prosecution experts giving higher scores than defense experts on both instruments -- there was a lot of variation even among the experts on the same side, and plenty of overlap between experts on opposing sides.

So, on average prosecution experts scored the PCL-R about three points higher than did the defense experts. But the scores given by experts on any given case ranged widely even within the same group. For example, in one case, prosecution experts gave PCL-R scores ranging from about 12 to 35 (out of a total of 40 possible points), with a similarly wide range among defense experts, from about 17 to 34 points. There was quite a bit of variability on scoring of the Static-99R, too; on one of the four cases, scores ranged all the way from a low of two to a high of ten (the maximum score being 12).

When the researchers debriefed the participants themselves, they didn't have a clue as to what caused the effect. That's likely because bias is mostly unconscious, and people tend to recognize it in others but not in themselves. So, when asked about factors that make psychologists vulnerable to allegiance effects, the participants endorsed things that applied to others and not to them: Those who worked at state facilities thought private practitioners were more vulnerable; experienced evaluators thought that inexperience was the culprit. (It wasn't.)

I tend to think that greater training in how to avoid falling prey to cognitive biases (see my previous post exploring this) could make a difference. But this may be wrong; the experiment to test my hypothesis has not been run. 

The study is: "Are forensic experts biased by the side that retained them?" by Daniel C. Murrie, Marcus T. Boccaccini, Lucy A. Guarnera and Katrina Rufino, forthcoming from Psychological Science. Contact the first author (HERE) if you would like to be put on the list to receive a copy of the article as soon as it becomes available.

Click on these links for lists of my numerous prior blog posts on the PCL-R, adversarial allegiance, and other creative research by Murrie, Boccaccini and their prolific team. Among my all-time favorite experiments from this research team is: "Psychopathy: A Rorschach test for pychologists?"

Exercise: Priming students to detect covert biases

In an eye-opening exercise in my graduate forensic psychology course, I had two groups separately analyze a sanitized forensic report. The subject of the report was a 16-year-old boy named "John" who had committed a relatively minor sex offense; the evaluation issue was treatment amenability. After independent group discussions, the two groups shared their impressions as follows:

Group A: "John has a conduct disorder and is narcissistic. His misconduct appears to be escalating. There are ominous warning signs of budding psychopathy. He is at a crossroads in his life; he could go bad fast."

Group B: "This report is biased. The evaluator has joined with John's mother, and is channeling the mother's antagonism toward John. There is evidence of racism, homophobia, and political conservatism. The evaluator’s antipathy toward John feels personal – perhaps he has a wayward teenage son?"

The two groups looked across the table at each other, flabbergasted. Some suspected a trick. "Did you really give us the same report to read?" one student queried.

Yes, everyone had read the identical report. And, in case you wondered, group selection was random; there were no baseline differences that would explain the groups' divergent opinions.

Rather, the difference was in how the two groups were primed to read the report. Their instructions:

Group A: "Read the report with the goal of trying to understand John. What makes him tick? Does he have any potential clinical diagnoses? What is your prognosis for his future?"

Group B: "Read the report with the goal of trying to understand the perspective of the report writer. Do you see any problems with his method or his analysis? If so, do they suggest any potential biases?"

This was no abstract academic exercise. Channeling John’s hateful mother, this seminal report reads like something torn from the pages of an Anne Rule novel, replete with enough (uncorroborated) animal torture and arson to excite any true believer in the infamous McDonald Triad. Going unchallenged at the time, the report had a hugely prejudicial impact on decision-makers. For years to come, institutional bureaucrats and forensic experts quoted liberally from it to bolster their opinions that John was dangerous.

This is not an isolated or unusual case. Alarmist reports like this have remarkable staying power, their uncorroborated claims taking on a life of their own as they ripple through their subjects' lives, eschewing rational analysis or contestation. The power of a single forensic evaluator is truly frightening at times.

Cutting through the hype

So how did a group of graduate students manage to see through the hype that had buffaloed seasoned professionals, to take the measure of the evaluator and expose his subterranean biases? Remarkably, all it took was a simple admonition to think critically, and to be alert to potential biases.

Ideally, we should always be exercising these analytical faculties. We should train ourselves to simultaneously process at least two units of analyses, asking ourselves both:

A. What does this report tell us about its subject?

B. What are the limitations of this report? How might its findings be unreliable, and perhaps flawed by unreliable or insufficient information, unconscious assumptions and biases, or other factors?

Cognitive biases

In the class exercise, Group A was focused only on Question A, whereas Group B focused on Question B. When forensic experts review a report, our approach should be bidirectional, and incorporate both perspectives.

Constructive skepticism benefits from an understanding of cognitive biases and how they work. In the instant case, the most obvious of these was confirmatory bias. This is the tendency to actively seek out and assign more weight to information that confirms one's prior beliefs, discounting or ignoring disconfirmatory data. Clinicians who fall under the spell of psychopathy theory, for example, tend to see psychopaths lurking behind every bush. A clue to the author's preconceptions in John's case was found in a footnote citing Stanton Samenow’s The Criminal Mind, an influential but decidedly polemic treatise that vigorously disavows social factors in crime and -- as its title implies -- caricatures criminals as a breed apart from normal human beings. 

Once you detect such selective perception in play, you may see related cognitive biases which the discerning expert should always be on the lookout for in forensic (and other) reports. These include, but are not limited to:

• Salience bias, in which inordinate attention is paid to exotic or highly distinctive information, at the expense of ordinary features of a case that may be important. In John's case, the evaluator overweighted the mother's fanciful tales about John's early childhood ("He never cried liked a normal baby!"), while ignoring more proximate evidence of John's confusion over his sexuality. In criminal cases, salience bias often contributes to racial stereotyping.

• Hindsight bias, or the tendency to see events as more predictable than they were before they took place. Using hindsight, forensic experts are prone to overvalue known facts that tend to explain an event; a countermeasure is to deliberately consider information that supports alternate conclusions. 

• Availability bias, in which the probability of an event is judged by how easy it is to think of examples. Especially when combined with ignorance of base rates, this can lead to a tendency to overpredict dramatic events, even when -- as in the case of black swans -- their likelihood is actually low.

• Illusory correlation, in which a relationship is imagined between variables that are in fact unrelated. In John's case, the mother's dramatic tales -- even if true -- may have had little or nothing to do with John's teenage misconduct. However, when read by subsequent decision-makers in a cultural climate that privileges psychopathy as an explanation for criminal conduct, they had an enormously prejudicial impact. 

(Wikipedia maintains an exhaustive list of these decision-making biases, along with links to their definitions.) 

To avoid perpetuating biases, forensic evaluators should train themselves to think like "Agent J" in Men in Black. Rather than jumping to superficially plausible conclusions, try to consciously develop alternate hypotheses and test their fit with the evidence. This scientific mindset kept Agent J (Will Smith) from assuming that little Tiffany, a blonde girl carrying quantum physics textbooks through the ghetto at night, was the innocent party just because she did not superficially resemble the monsters who were also out and about. Here is the scene from Men in Black that I show in my class, in which Agent J explains his logic in shooting Tiffany -- rather than the monsters -- during a simulation training:

Free access: British Journal of Forensic Practice

This week only, the British Journal of Forensic Practice is offering open access to all of its content. The journal covers a wide range of criminal justice topics, making it of potential interest for forensic practitioners, correctional professionals, academics, and those in allied fields. From my brief perusal, the journal appears to offer a refreshingly humanistic perspective, focusing on rehabilitation and critical analysis of current approaches. A few examples of recent articles and issues that caught my eye, all accessible this week (I've included links):

• Qualitative viewpoints in forensic practice – a special themed issue

• Treatment in forensic practice – a special themed issue, focused mainly on sex offenders

• Including the excluded: high security hospital user perspectives on stigma, discrimination, and recovery by Anna Williams, Estelle Moore, Gwen Adshead, Anthony McDowell, James Tapp

• Ganging up on gangs: why the gang intervention industry needs an intervention by James Densley

• How does the delivery of multisystemic therapy to adolescents and their families challenge practice in traditional services in the Criminal Justice System? by Zoë Ashmore, Simone Fox

• Is offender rehabilitation a form of punishment? by Tony Ward

• The alcohol treatment needs of violent and non-violent prisoners by Nicola Bowes, Adele Sutton, Serena Jenkins, Mary McMurran 

• Assessing the functions of self-harm behaviours for dangerous and severely personality disordered males in a high secure hospital by Jen Gallagher, Kerry Sheldon

• Reducing prisoner vulnerability and providing a means of empowerment: evaluating the impact of a Listener Scheme on the Listeners by Rani Dhaliwal, Julia Harrower

• Attitudes towards male and female sex offenders: a comparison of forensic staff, prison officers and the general public in Northern Ireland by Caitriona Higgins, Carol Ireland

• What we know about men who download child abuse images by Kerry Sheldon 

• Good Lives sexual offender treatment for mentally disordered offenders by Theresa A. Gannon, Tracy King, Helen Miles, Lona Lockerbie, Gwenda M. Willis

And that, folks, is just the tip of the iceberg. You'll need to browse the content yourself (HERE) to find the articles of special resonance with you.

Webinars to feature Grisso, Otto, child custody moot court

Sept. 29: Report writing and competence in forensic psychology 

Want to hear from forensic leaders on new developments in the field, but don't have the time (or extra money) to travel to do so? No worries. On Sept. 29, the New York State Psychological Association's annual forensic conference -- featuring forensic leaders Tom Grisso and Randy Otto -- will be available as a live Webinar.

In the morning keynote address, Thomas Grisso of the University of Massachusetts Medical School will provide guidance on forensic report writing based on his recent research project.

Later in the day, Randy Otto of the University of South Florida will address "Learning Needed to Become Competent as a Forensic Psychologist."

Although Webinar participants won't be able to imbibe at the wine social at St. John's University in Manhattan, they will get to listen in on the afternoon conversation hour between attendees and presenters. They will also hear one of the three mid-day breakout sessions (most likely the one on criminal court report writing, I am told).

The cost is $50 reduced to $35 for non-NYSPA members; $25 for students with proof. Unfortunately, remote participants will not earn continuing education credits. Which kind of makes sense, as there is no way to monitor attendance.

Sept. 30: Child custody moot court 

The following day, Sept. 30, the Queens campus of St. Johns will feature a training designed for professionals interested in learning more about conducting child custody evaluations. As with the previous day's training, this one will also be available to remote listeners.

"The Court is in Session: Psychologists on the Stand" will address effective and ethical expert testimony in the child custody context. Forensic psychologists, attorneys and a judge will then enact a simulation experience, or moot court, followed by a postmortem panel discussion. This event is co-sponsored by the Forensic Division of the New York State Psychology Association and the Nassau County Psychological Association.

It's exciting to see forensic programs offering Webinar access, which will make trainings more accessible to professionals in distant locations or those who do not want to spend hundreds of dollars on airfare and lodging to attend a training.

 Registration for Sept. 29 is HERE; registration for Sept. 30 is HERE.

A related article by Tom Grisso, Guidance for Improving Forensic Reports: A Review of Common Errors, is available for free from the Open Access Journal of Forensic Psychology.

Ranking forensic journals through content analysis

Illustration credit: Jock Alexander, The Australian

You have no doubt heard of journal "rankings." A journal's rank conveys information about the impact and quality of a journal. This can be useful information for both authors and consumers. An author might want to consider a journal's prestige, and the difficulty getting published in it. For consumers -- including expert witnesses who might be relying on a particular article in court -- ranking can serve as a proxy for the accuracy and reliability of a journal's content. How much should the trier of fact trust the information in this journal?

But there are lots of methods for ranking journals -- the Impact Factor, the Eigenfactor, the h-index, just to name a few. And with the proliferation of journals in forensic psychology, it gets hard to keep track. Which journals have the best reputations? Which are the most cited? Which provide the broadest coverage of forensic psychology topics?

One popular way to rank-order journals is based on reference counts. How many times a journal is cited is an indicator of its reputation. In forensic psychology, according to an unpublished study by S. Black, the top-referenced journals are (in rank order):

1. Law and Human Behavior
2. Behavioral Sciences and the Law
3. British Journal of Psychiatry
4. Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology
5. American Journal of Psychiatry
6. Criminal Justice and Behavior

Now, a researcher with training in both psychology and library science has taken a somewhat different approach, devising a clever content-analysis procedure to rank-order journals in our field.

Chris Piotrowski started by screening several texts in the field and choosing terms that are popular both in research and practice. The 16 terms were: eyewitness testimony, competency to stand trial, alcoholic blackouts, infanticide, sentencing, forensic evaluations, polygraph, malingering, jury selection, homicide, diminished capacity, insanity defense, child abuse, Daubert standard, child custody and expert witness.

Next he used PsycNET, "the recognized major bibliographic resource in the social and behavioral sciences that indexes scholarly and professional journals," to run keyword searches on his 16 terms. For each search term, he rank-ordered journals based on the frequency of hits; a journal's total ranking was obtained by summing across all 16 terms.

The winners were (in rank order):

1. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law
2. PsycCRITIQUES (formerly, Contemporary Psychology)
3. Law and Human Behavior
4. Behavioral Sciences and the Law
5. American Journal of Forensic Psychology
6. Journal of Psychiatry and Law
7. Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law
8. Mental & Physical Disability Law Reporter
9. American Journal of Psychiatry
10. American Psychologist
11. Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice
12. International Journal of Psychiatry and Law
13. Journal of Criminal Justice
14. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice
15. Journal of Applied Psychology
16. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology
17. Psychological Reports
18. British Journal of Psychology
19. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law

I would be a little cautious about relying on this method, because the choice of keywords -- which is open to manipulation -- might influence the rankings. But as you can see, there is overlap between this method and the more traditional citation-count method used by Black. For instance, Law and Human Behavior and Behavioral Sciences and the Law made it into the top four, no matter which method was used. There are some noticeable differences as well, with several journals that were highly cited in Black's study not ranking high using this content analysis method.

For more information on the method and the exact scores for each journal, feel free to contact Dr. Piotrowski (HERE); I'm sure he will be happy to share a copy of the article, which is published in the current issue of the American Journal of Forensic Psychology.

Oh, in case you were wondering, that journal is number five on his list.

The article is: Top cited journals in forensic psychology: An analysis of the psychological literature (2012), American Journal of Forensic Psychology 30 (2), 29-38.

At long last: New forensic specialty guidelines approved

After a 9-year revision process, the American Psychological Association has finally approved new Specialty Guidelines for Forensic Psychologists. The Guidelines will replace those established in 1991.

The Guidelines are intended for use not only by forensic psychologists, but by any psychologist when engaged in the practice of forensic psychology. Forensic psychology is defined as the application of any specialized psychological knowledge to a legal context, to assist in addressing legal, contractual, and administrative matters. The Guidelines are also meant to provide guidance on professional conduct to the legal system, and other organizations and professions.

Guidelines differ from standards, such as those in the APA’s Ethics Code, in that they are aspirational rather than mandatory. They are intended to facilitate the continued systematic development of the profession and facilitate a high level of practice by psychologists, rather than being intended to serve as a basis for disciplinary action or civil or criminal liability.

The revision committee, chaired by Randy Otto, included representatives of the American Psychology-Law Society (Division 41 of the APA) and the American Academy of Forensic Psychology. 

The Guidelines will be published shortly in the American Psychologist journal. In the meantime, a draft version is available HERE. I encourage all of you to read and learn its contents. Much of it will sound familiar to those with a working knowledge of the APA’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. Although the Guidelines dance around some of the major controversies in our field, there is still plenty to be happy about. By way of whetting your appetite (hopefully), here is a random smattering:

2.05 Knowledge of the Scientific Foundation for Opinions and Testimony: Forensic practitioners seek to provide opinions and testimony that are sufficiently based upon adequate scientific foundation, and reliable and valid principles and methods that have been applied appropriately to the facts of the case. When providing opinions and testimony that are based on novel or emerging principles and methods, forensic practitioners seek to make known the status and limitations of these principles and methods.

2.08 Appreciation of Individual and Group Differences: Forensic practitioners strive to understand how factors associated with age, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, language, socioeconomic status, or other relevant individual and cultural differences may affect and be related to the basis for people’s contact and involvement with the legal system.

6.03 Communication with Forensic Examinee: Forensic practitioners inform examinees about the nature and purpose of the examination, … including potential consequences of participation or non-participation, if known.

10.01 Focus on Legally Relevant Factors: Forensic practitioners are encouraged to consider the problems that may arise by using a clinical diagnosis in some forensic contexts, and consider and qualify their opinions and testimony appropriately.

11.04 Comprehensive and Accurate Presentation of Opinions in Reports and Testimony: Forensic practitioners are encouraged to limit discussion of background information that does not bear directly upon the legal purpose of the examination or consultation. Forensic practitioners avoid offering information that is irrelevant and that does not provide a substantial basis of support for their opinions, except when required by law.

Leonard Rubenstein, a senior scholar at the Center for Human Rights and Public Health of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, writes in a Huffington Post column that the new Guidelines will prevent psychologists from participating in abusive government interrogations as they did at Guantanamo. I think that's a stretch. These guidelines are not enforceable. And, like all such professional guidelines, they will be subject to diverse interpretations.

Forensic conference in idyllic Queensland setting

Hell's Gate, Noosa coastline (Photo credit: Kathleen)

For the indigenous Gubbi Gubbi people of southern Queensland, the Noosa area was a mecca and gathering place. Being here, I can certainly see why. The site of Australia’s Forensic Psychology National Conference is an idyllic tropical rain forest alongside a gorgeous coastline.

Even aside from the spectacular locale, the conference so far has been rewarding beyond my wildest expectations. Conference organizers and delegates alike have been overwhelmingly friendly and welcoming. They strike me as a serious and thoughtful bunch, communicating a solid commitment to ethical professional practice. Both my keynote -- on the subterranean tensions between technocratic and humanistic visions for our field -- and my all-day training workshop on forensic diagnosis were very well received. 

The vast continent of Australia has only 331 psychologists who are registered with the national government as forensic specialists (under the nationalization scheme that just went into effect), and it seems that most of them are here. Also in attendance are several other Americans invited to give keynote talks and all-day training workshops, including forensic guru Tom Grisso, Les Morey (the developer of the Personality Assessment Inventory) and John Edens, a prominent forensic psychologist from Texas A&M.

Blogger with Paul Wilson and conference chair Gavan Palk

A highlight for me was to get a chance to meet Paul Wilson, an internationally renowned criminologist and human rights activist. Paul (here, we all go by first names and forego the hierarchical ribbons and badges sported by speakers and officers at the typical psychological conference in the USA) is a prolific scholar and practitioner. He has been involved in many high-profile forensic cases, including on the effects of solitary confinement and of the forced removal of indigenous Australians from their ancestral homes. His latest book is Erasing Iraq: The Human Cost of Carnage, which -- as the title implies -- details the cost in human suffering of the war.

Paul's keynote focused on the role of forensic psychologists in miscarriage of justice cases. He has significant personal experience in this area, including involvement in Australia’s most infamous case of wrongful conviction, the so-called “Dingo Case" (made into a Hollywood movie starring Meryl Streep). That was the case in which Lindy Chamberlain was convicted of murder after her infant daughter disappeared while the family was camping at the famous Ayer’s Rock. It wasn’t until six years later that the baby’s clothing was found in a nearby dingo lair, proving that the mother was telling the truth when she said she saw a dingo carry off her baby.

Blogger with a new friend

It hasn’t been all work for me here in Queensland. I took the opportunity to see a bit of the Sunshine State, visiting first Cairns in tropical north Queensland and then Brisbane, the state’s biggest city. In Cairns, we journeyed out to the Great Barrier Reef for a little snorkeling, and also took in the local wildlife. We were lucky enough to spy the reclusive platypus in a creek in the Atherton Tablelands, as well as the much more abundant and visible kangaroos.

Further south, Queensland’s major city of Brisbane looks to have recovered quite nicely from the catastrophic flooding last January. Just goes to show what's possible in a country with a more rational social policy and a decent economy.

Brisbane is an attractive, up-and-coming city with lots of cool neighborhoods. As soon as we arrived, we were lucky enough to stumble across a vibrant organic food fair. We got to nibble and sip oodles of lovely locally produced treats -- fresh produce, dairy products, meats, sauces and wines.

Swimming enclosure, St. Helena Prison

While in Brisbane, we also toured an old prison on St. Helena Island in the Moreton Bay. It reminded me a bit of McNeil Island in Washington, where I worked for a spell. Operational from the 1860s to the 1930s, St. Helena went through several phases. Sometimes, it housed the Queensland prison system’s troublemakers and the criminally insane. At other times, it was a model prison farm reserved for well-behaved prisoners. At the end, it held aged and infirm convicts. To discourage escape during the harsh old days, prison warders attracted sharks by dumping cow offal along the beaches. Prisoners who wanted to swim after a day of back-breaking labor in the fields, sugar mill or factory could do so only in a small offshore area enclosed by long poles. (See photo.) But during our visit to the ruins, the fearsome predators were long gone and the setting was serene and idyllic. Just us, the guide who ferried us across on a small boat, and a few wallabies, shorebirds, and grazing cattle belonging to the national park service.

For me, Australia has been well worth the long airplane ride to get here; I hope to come back again to see Sydney, Melbourne, and Western Australia and to visit with some of my newfound colleagues in Australia's wonderful community of forensic psychologists.

Psychopathy: A Rorschach test for psychologists?

• Compassion
• Empathy
• Impulsivity
• Excitement-seeking

What do these personality traits have in common?

If you are high on any or all of them, you may be less likely to rate other people as psychopathic on the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R).

The PCL-R is the most widely used measure of psychopathy in the world. But in real-world forensic settings, scores vary widely depending upon which side retained the evaluator. This finding is called the "partisan allegiance" effect.

In a new twist, these same researchers that brought you partisan allegiance have found that an evaluator's personality may impact her judgments of psychopathy. Evaluators low on compassion and thrill-seeking as measured by a widely used personality test, the NEO Personality Inventory-Revised, are more likely than others to rate criminals as psychopathic.

That’s ironic, because according to the theory of psychopathy, it's supposed to be the psychopath -- not the psychologist -- who has a deficit in empathy.

The exploratory study, forthcoming in the journal Assessment, was based on a small sample of 22 individuals who were given nine hours of training by a clinical psychologist with substantial research and forensic practice experience with the PCL-R. "The daylong session was an attempt to replicate typical PCL-R training procedures," the study authors explain.

The researchers emphasize that their findings are preliminary and need to be replicated and extended. But if they hold up, they have intriguing implications not only for the psychopathy measure but also for other psychological tests with elements of subjectivity in scoring or interpretation.

The study did not examine the accuracy of the low versus high scorers. But if low-scoring evaluators are more empathetic, this implies that they may be more accurate in interpersonal assessment contexts.  

Subterranean class conflict?

Future research might examine class background, race and philosophical  beliefs to see if these influence scoring of the Psychopathy Checklist. In my informal observations, professionals who look for psychopaths under every rock tend to lack understanding of, or empathy for, those on the bottom.

Here's how that looks in practice:

The upper middle-class professional walks into the evaluation room, oblivious to the blinders and unconscious biases she brings to the table. Her subject, in contrast, is far from oblivious. With his more acute empathetic skills, the lower-class or minority individual accurately reads the professional's bias against him, which she transmits through nonverbal and other deniable cues. He also realizes that she holds all the power, and that her judgments will affect his future in very tangible ways.

He reacts with defensiveness, suspicion, or muted hostility -- especially if she is working for "the other side." But not recognizing his reaction as part of an interactional dance that she herself set in motion, the evaluator interprets his stance as evidence of intrinsic personality defect. She may see him as glib, superficially charming, conning, or manipulative -- all facets of Factor 1 (the personality dimension) on the Psychopathy Checklist.

In this interaction, all of the power belongs to the person who gets to do the labeling. Scoring and labeling the offender becomes a circular process through which the evaluator -- especially when primed by adversarial allegiance -- can  project her own class- or race-based prejudices, distancing herself from the evil other, while at the same time denying complicity. An obfuscating tautology is proffered as a simple explanation for complex and multi-determined antisocial acts.

There is more to the construct of psychopathy, of course. I focus here on its potential subjectivity because this is a facet that proponents rarely acknowledge, especially in public. Forensic experts owe a duty to explain the subjectivity of the PCL-R when it is introduced in court, where the label "psychopath" can be the kiss of death. When labeled as psychopaths:

• Juveniles are more likely to face harsh punishment in adult court.
• Sex offenders are more likely to be preventively detained.
• Capital murder defendants are more likely to receive the death penalty.

So, the next time a promising young student proposes to study psychopathy or "the criminal mind," you might give her a gentle nudge in a more fruitful direction: Rather than treading this tired old path, she might contribute more to the field by studying the psyches of professionals who assign such diagnostic labels in the first place. 

• The study is: On Individual Differences in Person Perception: Raters' Personality Traits Relate to Their Psychopathy Checklist -Revised Scoring Tendencies. The authors are Audrey K. Miller, Katrina A. Rufino, Marcus T. Boccaccini, Rebecca L. Jackson and Daniel C. Murrie. Assessment, forthcoming.

• Of related interest: Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy, by Michael W. Kraus, Stéphane Côté and Dacher Keltner, Psychological Science, November 2010.

Justice perverted: Sex offense law, psychology and public policy

 Oxford University Press has just released this provocative new title of likely interest to many of my readers. It's written by esteemed forensic psychologist and attorney Charles Patrick Ewing, a law professor at The State University of New York, University at Buffalo Law School.

Summary:

Over the past quarter century Congress, state legislatures and the courts have radically reshaped America's laws dealing with sex offenders in an effort to reduce the prevalence of sex offenses. Most convicted sex offenders must now register with the authorities, who then make information about them available to the public. Possession of child pornography has been made an extremely serious crime often punishable by prison sentences that dwarf those meted out to child molesters, rapists, robbers, and even killers. Federal law now imposes a minimum sentence of ten years in prison for those convicted of using the internet to attempt to lure minors for sex. And the federal government and 20 states have "sexually violent predator" laws that allow the indefinite civil commitment of convicted sex offenders to secure institutions for treatment after they have served their full criminal sentences.

All of these changes in sex offender law, as well as numerous others, have been based at least in part on input from psychology, psychiatry and the social sciences. Moreover, enforcement and administration of many of these laws relies to a large extent on the efforts of mental health professionals. However, many questions about this involvement remain largely unanswered:

• Are these laws supported by empirical evidence, or even by well-reasoned psychological theories? Do these laws actually work? 

• Are mental health professionals capable of reliably determining an offender's future behavior, and how best to manage it? 

• Are experts capable of providing effective treatment for sex offenders -- i.e., treatment that actually reduces the likelihood that an identified sex offender will re-offend?

Drawing on research from across the social and behavioral sciences, Dr. Ewing weighs the evidence for the spectrum of sex offense laws, to occasionally surprising results. A rational look at an intensely emotional subject, Justice Perverted is an essential book for anyone interested in the science behind public practice.

What others are saying:

Ewing …gives a lucid, objective analysis of the laws, easily separating myth from reality in this intensely emotional area.

-- Philip H. Witt, Ph.D., ABPP, President, American Academy of Forensic Psychology, co-author, Evaluation of Sexually Violent Predators

A remarkable, eye-opener of a book—Professor Ewing brings to this highly controversial subject his knowledge as both a law professor and as a practicing forensic mental health expert.

--Alan M. Goldstein, Ph.D., ABPP, Professor Emeritus, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

This book is a breath of fresh air. It debunks the media-driven frenzy of fear, hate mongering, and utterly irrational laws that do far more harm than good. Professor Ewing writes thoughtfully, carefully, and persuasively. This book should be read by all who care about—and think about—this topic.

 --Michael L. Perlin, Law Professor, Director of International Mental Disability Law Reform Project, New York Law School

 Ewing is a prolific author, and never disappoints. His other recent books, which I have reviewed, include:

• Trials of a Forensic Psychologist: A Casebook

• Insanity: Murder, Madness, and the Law

• Minds on Trial: Great Cases in Law and Psychology

Special issue, Current Directions in Psychological Science

The February issue offers a cutting-edge roundup of psychology-law topics, with contributions from many luminaries. Click on an author link to request a reprint.

• Expert Psychological Testimony by Brian L. Cutler and Margaret Bull Kovera (I haven't finished reading this one yet, but I see that it discusses the critical issue of adversarial allegiance, identified by Murrie, Boccaccini and their colleagues in regard to the Psychopathy Checklist)

• Future Directions in the Restoration of Competency to Stand Trial by Patricia A. Zapf and Ronald Roesch

• Current Directions in Violence Risk Assessment by Jennifer L. Skeem and John Monahan

• The Psychology of Trial Judging by Neil Vidmar

• Jury Decision Making: Implications For and From Psychology by Brian H. Borstein and Edie Greene

• Suspect Interviews and False Confessions by Gisli H. Gudjonsson and John Pearse

• The Utility of Scientific Jury Selection: Still Murky After 30 Years by Joel D. Lieberman

• Resolving the Offender "Profiling Equations" and the Emergence of an Investigative Psychology by David V. Canter

• Forensic Interviewing Aids: Do Props Help Children Answer Questions About Touching? by Debra Ann Poole, Maggie Bruck, Margaret-Ellen Pipe

• Interviewing Cooperative Witnesses by Ronald P. Fisher, Rebecca Milne, and Ray Bull

• Current Issues and Advances in Misinformation Research by Steven J. Frenda, Rebecca M. Nichols, and Elizabeth F. Loftus

• Eyewitness Identification by Neil Brewer and Gary L. Wells

• Outsmarting the Liars: Toward A Cognitive Lie Detection Approach by Aldert Vrjj, Par Anders Granhag, Samantha Mann, and Sharon Leal

This blogger to give keynotes in Australia, UK

I am excited to announce that I will be delivering keynote addresses at forensic conferences in Australia and the United Kingdom later this year. I hope to be able to meet some of you in person at one or the other.

After the floods and cyclone -- join me on the Sunshine Coast

I will be giving both a keynote address and an all-day training at Australia's national forensic psychology conference, taking place from August 4-6 in Noosa, in the state of Queensland. Other keynote speakers are Australian forensic psychologists Paul Wilson, Don Thomson and Alfred Allan, and fellow Americans Tom Grisso and Leslie Morey.

This year's theme is "Diversity and Specialism in Forensic Psychology." If you think you have a good idea for a forensic talk or workshop, I would encourage you to submit a proposal. Be quick about it, though, as the deadline is the end of February.

Along with an exciting scientific program, the organizers are promising fun social functions and a chance to network "in a friendly and relaxed environment." Noosa is not too far away from the recent catastrophic flooding and Cyclone Yasi, but I'm sure flood waters will have receded by August. I'll be sharing more details in coming months.

Next up: Sexual violence conference in London

On September 8, I will be delivering another keynote at a Sexual Violence conference sponsored by the Forensic Psychological Services program at Middlesex University in London. My focus will be the role of culture and masculinity in multiple-perpetrator rape (the topic of my 2004 theoretical article). Again, stay tuned for more details.

I am excited to be a part of this program because of the organizers' cutting-edge efforts toward preventing sexual violence, especially rape by multiple perpetrators. The Forensic Psychological Services Program at Middlesex University sponsored similar conferences on hate crimes in 2008 and 2010, with an innovative focus on offender motivations and prevention.

You can get involved in this one, too. The organizers are inviting proposals for papers and debate panels pertaining to sexual violence, especially those based on empirical research and/or involving new and emerging topics. One of their major goals is to foster more exchange of ideas among practitioners, academics and policy makers. The deadline for submissions is April 15 (Tax Day, here on the other side of the Atlantic).

California training to feature confession expert

Dr. Richard Leo, Associate Law Professor at USF and a leading scholar in the area of false confessions, will be the keynote speaker at next month's conference of the Forensic Mental Health Association of California. His presentation is titled False Confessions: Causes, Characteristics and Solutions.*

The conference, "Mental Health and the Law: An In-Depth Look at the Evidence," will be March 23-25 in Seaside (just outside of picturesque Monterey).

The FMHAC has scored some other big names, too, including Richard Rogers and Robert Hare. Topics of interest include the effect of high-profile crimes on SVP laws in California, competency restoration treatment in county jails, malingering assessment, and lots more.

*My review of Dr. Leo's book, Police Interrogation and American Justice, is HERE.

How competent are the competency evaluators?

Largest real-world study finds modest agreement among independent alienists

A bad forensic report by a bad evaluator sets bad events in motion.

True story: A judge ordered a robbery suspect to undergo evaluation. A drive-by psychologist opined that the defendant was incompetent to stand trial due to schizophrenia and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The judge rubber-stamped the evaluator's opinion. The defendant was shipped off to the dysfunctional state hospital system for competency restoration treatment. There, the psychologist's diagnoses were rubber-stamped. The unruly defendant was shot full of powerful antipsychotics, given a few months of bus therapy, and proclaimed competent. The defendant had never been psychotic in the first place. Years later, he remained just as mentally retarded as ever.

"Penny-wise, pound-foolish" is the expression that comes to mind. The courts try to save money by appointing only one psychologist per case, and by paying a ludicrously small sum that encourages shoddy practices. But cleaning up the resultant messes is costly, inefficient, and fundamentally unfair.

Competency evaluations are the bread and butter of forensic work. An estimated 60,000 defendants per year -- roughly 5% of the total -- are evaluated to see whether they understand their legal situations and can rationally assist their lawyers in their defense. But for all of the importance of accurate assessments, both to a smoothly running court system and to the rights of the mentally ill to a fair trial, surprisingly little is known about the real-world accuracy of forensic evaluators.

In the case I just outlined, the judge viewed psychologists and psychiatrists as equal and interchangeable, all inherently reliable and trustworthy. At the other extreme, some believe forensic opinions are as random as a chimp with a typewriter.

Hawaii: Exemplar or exception?

Only one U.S. state squarely addresses the problem of reliability in competency evaluations. In the Aloha State, when a doubt is raised as to a defendant's competency, three separate evaluators must conduct independent evaluations. One evaluator is a state employee; the other two are independent. One must be a psychiatrist. By law, the three cannot talk with each other about the case.

This makes Hawaii the perfect setting to examine the real-world reliability of competency evaluators. In a study just accepted for publication in Law and Human Behavior, three investigators took advantage of this opportunity to conduct the largest naturalistic study ever of evaluators' agreement about competency to stand trial.

It should not be a surprise that Daniel Murrie and Marcus Boccaccini are two of the investigators. Not the types to run Psych 101 undergrads through artificial lab experiments, these two are committed to examining forensic practice in the courtroom trenches. I've blogged about their previous work exposing "partisan allegiance" effects in the real-world application of the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R). For the current innovative study, they teamed up with W. Neil Gowensmith of the Hawaii courts' forensic services unit.

Examining 729 reports authored by 35 evaluators, they found that all three evaluators agreed in just under three out of four -- or 71 percent -- of initial competency referrals. Agreement was a bit lower -- 61 percent -- in cases where defendants were being reevaluated after undergoing competency restoration treatment.

Consistent with the results of a hot-off-the-press meta-analysis of 50 years of competency research, evaluators believed that the broad majority of defendants referred for evaluation, about 73 percent, were competent to stand trial. This figure was somewhat lower for defendants being reevaluated after an initial finding of competency, with evaluators opining competence in about half of such restoration cases.

Why do evaluators differ?

As far as why agreement is not higher, the study raised more questions than it answered. The researchers sifted through the data looking for patterns, but none jumped out. Evaluators did not lean one way or the other by discipline (psychologist vs. psychiatrist) or by employer (state versus private practice). Defendant demographics were not explanatory. Nor were evaluator disagreements about diagnosis.

It would be interesting to conduct qualitative analyses of the 216 cases in this study to see whether those in which evaluators differed were more complex and ambiguous than the others. I suspect that to be the case.

Competency is nebulous. It exists along a continuum, so there is no precise cut point at which a defendant is automatically "competent" or "incompetent" to go forward with his legal case. Thus, evaluator agreement will never be perfect, nor -- necessarily -- should it be.

How did the judges rule?

One of the more intriguing aspects of the study was its exposition of how judges ruled after being presented with three reports. Not surprisingly, when evaluators were unanimous or split 2-1, the judges tended to go with the majority. But unlike the judge in the vignette I described earlier, many Hawaiian judges were independent thinkers who did not just rubber-stamp the evaluators' opinions.

When they disagreed with the opinions of the court-appointed psychologists and psychiatrists, it was typically to find a defendant incompetent. In fact, in a few cases the judges found defendants to be incompetent even when all three evaluators believed a defendant was competent. In this way, they elevated defendants' due-process rights over prosecutorial efficiency. But maybe that's just Hawaii.

Moving forward

I found the results somewhat encouraging. When not subjected to partisan allegiance pressures, forensic practitioners agreed about three-fourths of the time about whether a defendant was competent to stand trial or not.

Still, if these results are generalizable, it means evaluators will disagree in about two or three cases out of every ten. So in jurisdictions that appoint only a single evaluator, the researchers point out, many judges may be unwittingly rubber-stamping an idiosyncratic -- and even patently incorrect -- opinion:

[T]o the extent that there is a factually correct answer to the question of whether or not a defendant is competent to stand trial, relying on one evaluator increases the likelihood that the court reaches an incorrect decision (by following an incorrect single opinion that would have been revealed as a minority opinion if other evaluations were available). In some instances, this may result in delaying a trial while a defendant is unnecessarily hospitalized. In other instances this may result in a defendant proceeding to trial when additional evaluator(s) would have opined the defendant was unable to participate meaningfully in that trial….

The justice system needs to continue to wrestle with how to handle these competing demands -- efficient use of resources versus fair consideration of defendants' right to due process.

Murrie and Boccaccini are on a roll. Let's hope they keep churning out this ground-breaking line of research, examining the real-world vagaries of forensic practice, and that others climb down from the ivory towers and jump on their bandwagon.

As they note, "naturalistic studies of field reliability are an essential first step in gauging wide-scale quality across all manner of forensic practice and targeting areas for improvement."

Child abuse assessment: Special issue

Forensic psychologist Eric Mart has guest edited a special issue of the Journal of Psychiatry and the Law on assessment and testimony in cases of child abuse. The articles address both scientific and practical aspects of child abuse assessment, testimony, and research. They include:

Maternal Filicide and Mental Illness in Italy: This retrospective review co-authored by Geoffrey McKee, who has written books on filicide, and Alesandra Bramante compares the forensic characteristics of mothers with and without severe mental illness who killed their children.

Interviewing Immigrant Children for Suspected Child Maltreatment: Lisa Aronson Fontes examines challenges posed in forensic interviews of immigrant children when there is a suspicion that these children may be victims of child abuse or neglect. Suggestions are made
for interviewers regarding the interview setting, preparations, building rapport, conveying respect, narrative training, pacing the interview, and trauma symptoms that may stem from issues unrelated to the abuse.

Persistent Problems with the "Separation Test" in Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy: Munchausen syndrome by proxy remains a controversial diagnosis because information is easily tainted to make the mother appear responsible for her child’s symptoms. Loren Pankratz critiques (and offers alternatives to) the “separation test,” a scientifically problematic procedure that is often used to gather evidence against the mother.

Common Errors in the Assessment of Allegations of Child Sexual Abuse: Finally, the special issue editor himself tackles common errors in the complex, challenging, and high-stakes undertaking of assessing CSA allegations. After reviewing frequent causes of substandard investigations, the illustrious Dr. Mart provides ideas for research-based methods to improve the situation.