Psychopathy controversy goes primetime

More than a million people worldwide will get a chance to learn about psychology's internal controversy over psychopathy tomorrow, when Science publishes an article on the censorship allegations that I blogged about May 30.

Perhaps not coincidentally, just as the June 11 issue of the world's leading scientific news outlet hits the presses, the American Psychological Association is suddenly publishing the disputed article that was siderailed for more than three years.

Forensic psychologists Jennifer Skeem and David Cooke submitted the contested article to Psychological Assessment in 2006. It was peer reviewed, accepted, and scheduled for publication in 2007, but was derailed after Robert Hare, inventor of the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL), threatened to sue for defamation.

As you will remember from my previous blog post, the controversy surfaced in an opinion piece last month in the International Journal of Forensic Mental Health by two psychology-law leaders.

"[T]he threat of litigation constitutes a serious threat to academic freedom and potentially to scientific progress," wrote attorney John Petrila and psychologist Norman Poythress. "Academic freedom rests on the premise that advances in science can only occur if scholars are permitted to pursue free competition among ideas. This assumes that scholars have the liberty to do their work free from limitations imposed by political or religious pressure or by economic reprisals."

Hare now says he is "upset colleagues are suggesting he squelched academic debate," Science writer John Tavris reports, as his "lawsuit threat was meant only to get the 'attention' of APA, Skeem, and Cooke and force changes to the article."

The Science report is a sidebar to a larger piece on reform efforts over plaintiff-friendly libel laws in the United Kingdom. That country's laws, in which the defendant bears the burden of proof, are under fire from around the world over their allegedly chilling effect on scientific research on controversial topics. Critics say they encourage "libel tourism," in which corporations sue there over alleged offenses that occurred elsewhere.

PCL-R reification hampering science

The contested article by Skeem and Cooke, "Is Criminal Behavior a Central Component of Psychopathy? Conceptual Directions for Resolving the Debate," posits that the field of forensic psychology has prematurely embraced Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) as the gold standard for psychopathy, due in large part to legal demands for a tool to predict violence. Yet the PCL-R's ability to predict violent recidivism owes in large part to its conflation of the supposed personality construct of psychopathy with past criminal behavior, they argue:

[T]he modern justice context has created a strong demand for identifying bad, dangerous people…. [The] link between the PCL and violence has supported a myth that emotionally detached psychopaths callously use violence to achieve control over and exploit others. As far as the PCL is concerned, this notion rests on virtually no empirical support…. [T]he process of understanding psychopathy must be separated from the enterprise of predicting violence.

Criminal behavior weighs heavily in the PCL's 20 items because the instrument emerged from research with prisoners. But using the PCL-R's consequent ability to predict violence to assert the theoretical validity of its underlying personality construct is a tautological, or circular, argument, claim Skeem and Cooke. Or, as John Ellard put it more directly back in 1998:

"Why has this man done these terrible things? Because he is a psychopath. And how do you know that he is a psychopath? Because he has done these terrible things."

Rebuttal and response

Alongside the critique, Psychological Assessment has published a rebuttal by Robert Hare and Craig Neumann, along with a surrebuttal by Cooke and Skeem. Hare and Neumann accuse the critics of erecting a straw-man argument and misrepresenting their work:

The very title of their article is a straw man based on the unfounded claim that Hare and his colleagues consider criminality to be central or fundamental to the psychopathy construct. Their claim is bolstered by arguments misconstruing our published work and that of others and by quotes of our work that have been taken out of context or reconstructed in such a way that it appears that we have said something that we did not say. Skeem and Cooke also made highly selective use of the literature, often omitting published studies that directly contradict or do not support the points they attempted to make, particularly with respect to the role of antisocial tendencies in clinical and empirical conceptions of psychopathy. These tactics are inconsistent with their tutorial on the philosophy of science, compromise their arguments, and divert attention from any legitimate issues raised in their article. We contend that Skeem and Cooke did the field a disservice by presenting an inaccurate account of the role of the PCL–R in theory and research on psychopathy, both applied and basic.

I encourage readers to analyze all three papers, along with the two reports in Science, and draw your own conclusions.

• My original post on the controversy is HERE; a brief followup is HERE.
• Science writer John Travis' blog post on the story, in Science Insider (with more links), is HERE.
• Coverage at Mind Hacks is HERE.
• For more background and links on the UK libel law reform campaign, see my March 27 post, "Lie detection critic silenced by lawsuit."
  

The current issue of Psychological Assessment contains another article pertaining to the controversial psychopathy construct. In their abstract of "Validity of Rorschach Inkblot scores for discriminating psychopaths from nonpsychopaths in forensic populations: A meta-analysis," authors James Wood, Scott Lilienfeld and colleagues assert:

Gacono and Meloy (2009) have concluded that the Rorschach Inkblot Test is a sensitive instrument with which to discriminate psychopaths from nonpsychopaths. We examined the association of psychopathy with 37 Rorschach variables in a meta-analytic review of 173 validity coefficients derived from 22 studies comprising 780 forensic participants…. The present findings contradict the view that the Rorschach is a clinically sensitive instrument for discriminating psychopaths from nonpsychopaths.

New study: Children of lesbians more competent

The growing acceptance of same-sex marriage -- now legal in 8 countries, 5 U.S. states, and among the Coquille Indians in Oregon -- demonstrates the rapid social and legal progress of lesbians and gay men. Yet a handful of expert witnesses are still testifying in court that sexual minority parents put children at risk for bad outcomes.

Experts must rely on science. So these antigay experts cite biased research and make strained inferences from supposed empirical evidence of higher rates of psychiatric problems, substance abuse, and relationship instability among sexual minorities as a group. Of course, it's apples and oranges, because those studies are not of parents. These self-described experts only get away with such testimony due to societal prejudice; imagine a scientist testifying for a ban on adoption by Native Hawaiians due to their relatively higher rates of illegal drug use than Asians as a group.

But a new study in the journal Pediatrics blows this sham pseudoscience out of the water. The first prospective, longitudinal study of planned lesbian families found that by adolescence the sons and daughters of lesbians had better psychological adjustment across the board than their demographically matched counterparts from a large normative sample of American youth.

At age 17, both boys and girls were rated significantly higher in social, academic, and total competence and significantly lower in social problems, rule-breaking, aggression, and externalizing behavioral problems.

Interestingly, although more than half of the co-parent couples separated during the time period of the study, this did not affect their children's psychological health. That finding contrasts with the negative impact of divorce on children in heterosexual families. The researchers theorize it may be due to the nature of shared child-rearing among separted lesbian mothers.

The authors theorize that one factor in the relatively superior adjustment of these children is that their parents use less corporal punishment and authoritarian power assertion than do heterosexual fathers:

Growing up in households with less power assertion and more parental involvement has been shown to be associated with healthier psychological adjustment. Also, adolescent boys who are close to their parents are less likely to engage in delinquent behavior.

The study followed 154 prospective mothers who volunteered beginning in 1986 to be followed from their children's conception to adulthood. Because of its prospective nature, findings were not skewed by overrepresentation of families who volunteered once their offspring were doing well. Although the sample was non-random, this was offset by a remarkably high retention rate of 93 percent. The study is ongoing.

These and related findings have significant implications for child custody and adoption cases in which experts testify that the sexuality of the parents is relevant under the "best interest of the child" standard. Respected child custody expert Jonathan Gould and his colleagues have argued that parental sexual orientation is irrelevant to this issue. Forensic psychologist William O'Donohue disagrees. But now, an expert who does raise parental sexuality as a potential negative can expect to be confronted with mounting evidence that -- far from being a liability -- having lesbian parents may actually confer some advantages to children.

Related resources:

Pediatrics has made the article available for free online (HERE). My article in the Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice summarizing the state of this research as of 2003 is: Practice Opportunities with an Emerging Family Form: The Planned Lesbian and Gay Family (Volume 3, Issue 3, pages 47-64).

Photo credit: Telegraph (UK); Hat tip: Ken Pope

Groundbreaking study of sex offender life courses

Challenge to actuarials: 4 distinct trajectories ID'd

Actuarial tools to predict offenders' future risk are all the rage. They provide a veneer of science in that on average their simple formulas work somewhat better than the flip of a coin. But a bit of sleight of hand is involved. They work only by lumping everyone together, making the vast differences among individuals with similar risk scores magically disappear. Thus, they say little about the risk of the specific offender standing in court awaiting judgment.

In addition to masking differences between individuals, actuarial risk assessment tools such as the Static-99 and the MnSOST-R ignore changes within an individual over time. As offenders age, they tend to rack up more arrests, which are scored as historical risk factors that elevate risk. But paradoxically, as men reach their 40s their days of crime are numbered. Many actuarially minded evaluators show a remarkable ignorance of the robust criminological literature on desistance, viewing sex offenders through an insular and mechanistic lens of history as destiny.

In the first study to directly challenge these actuarial fallacies by examining the offending trajectories of adult sex offenders from early adolescence to adulthood, a group of Canadian criminologists has identified four distinct offending trajectories, and in the process found a couple of surprises.

The four trajectories, identified by Patrick Lussier of Simon Fraser University and his colleagues through a longitudinal, retrospective study of 250 convicted sex offenders in a federal prison, were -- in order from most to least prevalent:

• Very-low rate (56%): The most common trajectory involves a very low rate of offending over the time period examined, from ages 12 to 35. Most of these men were child molesters. Their offending appeared to be transitory and limited.

• Low-rate desistors (26%): This group followed the age-crime curve identified by criminologists such as Sampson and Laub and Moffitt for offenders in general. This trajectory takes off gradually in adolescence, peaks in young adulthood, and gradually declines in the mid-30s. Offenders begin with general criminal activity and escalate over time to more serious crimes, including sex offending. Paradoxically, sex offending begins just as their overall criminal activity is slowing down.

• Late bloomers (10%): This group is largely neglected in scientific literature about sex offending, according to the researchers. Rather than following the typical age-crime curve, late bloomers start their offending in adulthood, and gradually increase into their mid-30s. Like the low-rate desistors, this group progresses from nonsexual, nonviolent crimes to sex crimes. Many of these offenders sexually assault adolescent females.

• High-rate chronics (8%): This group somewhat matches that known to criminologists as the "life-course persistent" group. The smallest of the four groups, it is also the most criminally active. These offenders start out as juvenile delinquents and offend frequently as adults, with sex offenses as just one component of general criminality. Most of the sex offenders in this group raped adult women.

These findings have a notable implication for risk assessment with juveniles. Despite their highly divergent rates of crime and desistance, three out of the four groups are not distinguishable during adolescence. As Frank DiCataldo explains in his new book, Perversion of Youth, the smart gambler will place bets that any random juvenile sex offender will NOT go on to become a chronic sex offender as an adult.

Lussier and his colleagues are critical of the actuarial tools for failing to capture the desistance process:

Some individuals might be considered high-risk offenders when their criminal activity is actually in the desistance process. This might be particularly true for the low-rate desistors and the high-rate chronics. Others, such as the late-bloomers, might be underestimated by actuarial tools considering that their criminal involvement started later and did not accumulate the risk factors included in the actuarial tools, in spite of the fact that their offending is accelerating…. We are left wondering how current actuarial risk assessment tools can account for the diversity of offending trajectories of sex offenders and the dynamic aspect of their offending over [the] life course.

The researchers report that they will study the predictive validity of their model in a future study. They also recommend further studies to extend the age range past the mid-30s, to better understand the various trajectories over the entire life course.

The study is: "Criminal trajectories of adult sex offenders and the age effect: Examining the dynamic aspect of offending in adulthood," by Patrick Lussier, Stacy Tzoumakis, Jesse Cale, and Joanne Amirault, in the current issue of the International Criminal Justice Review.

Other newly published articles on the actuarial controversy:

Campbell, T.W., & DeClue, G. (2010). Flying Blind with Naked Factors: Problems and Pitfalls in Adjusted-Actuarial Sex-Offender Risk Assessment. Open Access Journal of Forensic Psychology. Available ONLINE.

ABSTRACT: Actuarial instruments are typically the centerpieces of evaluations pursuant to civil commitment statutes for sex offenders. Almost as frequently as they rely on actuarial instruments, evaluators adjust actuarial data via weighing additional variables that are (presumably) correlated with recidivism. Typically, however, such variables are only weakly related to reoffending. This article reviews many problems and pitfalls undermining Adjusted Actuarial Assessment (AAA) and reports data demonstrating how ill advised this procedure is. Publicly available data do not support a claim in a recent meta-analysis (Hanson and Morton-Bourgon, 2009, p. 7), "For all three measures, for all types of raters, and for all outcomes, the adjusted scores showed lower predictive accuracy than did the unadjusted actuarial scores." Based on available data, at its best, AAA neither increases nor decreases the accuracy of actuarial classification. At its worst, AAA dilutes actuarial accuracy.

Craig, L.A., & Beech, A.R. (2010). Towards a guide to best practice in conducting actuarial risk assessments with sex offenders. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 15, 278-293.

ABSTRACT: Assessing the risk of further offending behavior by adult sexual perpetrators is highly relevant and important to professionals involved in public protection. Although recent progress in assessing risk in sexual offenders has established validity of actuarial measures, there continues to be some debate about application of these instruments. Increasingly forensic practitioners are being requested to give expert witness evidence in formal settings where actuarial risk estimates are being examined. This is true in the Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) hearings in the United States and the Parole Board Hearings in the United Kingdom. It is important therefore for practitioners using actuarial scales in adversarial settings to have a thorough understanding of methodological limitations of the technology and possible errors and inaccuracies of reporting actuarial risk estimates in individual cases. The aim of this paper is to summarize strengths and weaknesses of actuarial risk data, and to contribute to developing guidance on best practice when using actuarial measures in adversarial settings. This paper is organized into six areas: (1) Actuarial scales in practice; (2) Understanding risk prediction concepts; (3) Factors known to affect actuarial estimates; (4) Can we use group data to assess risk in individual cases; (5) Choosing which actuarial risk measure to use; and (6) Reporting actuarial risk estimates. It is hoped this paper goes some way to establishing guidance on the best practice of actuarial scales and associated limitations.

More coverage of psychopathy censorship controversy

The controversy over Robert Hare's attempt to block publication of a peer-reviewed article critical of his psychopathy construct is getting more attention since Sunday's blog post. Among the online coverage:

• The Chronicle of Higher Education has a brief report.

• The ever-excellent Mind Hacks blog has a report and critical commentary, later reposted on Psydir News.

• Intellectual Competence and the Death Penalty gives it a nod, as does Kevin Cole, Dean at the University of San Diego School of Law, at his CrimProf blog.

• And they're even blogging about it over in Gothenburg, Sweden!

Overwhelmingly, opinion is that Dr. Hare shot himself in the foot by threatening legal action against the researchers and the journal. Hopefully, this debacle will serve as a cautionary tale for others whose research undergoes critical scrutiny due to forensic or other public-policy implications.

Federal judge rules against fMRI lie detector

The widely awaited ruling on the admissibility in court of fMRI for lie detection purposes has just come down, and it's bad news for proponents of the novel brain-scanning technology. In a potentially landmark opinion, a federal magistrate ruled yesterday that the technology is unreliable and has not been accepted by the scientific community. The 39-page opinion followed a closely watched evidentiary hearing in Tennessee (see my previous post HERE).

Detailed coverage of testimony at the Daubert evidentiary hearing can be found HERE. As reported by Science Insider, Judge Tu Pham held that the novel scientific technique has been subjected to testing and peer review, but is not general accepted by scientists nor are its error rates established. The judge's ruling also highlighted the distinction between laboratory research and performance in real-world settings.

Lorne Semrau, a psychiatrist facing trial on multiple counts of Medicare and Medicaid fraud, had sought to introduce his fMRI results as evidence of lack of fraudulent intent.

The full ruling is online HERE.

Psychopathy guru blocks critical article

Will case affect credibility of PCL-R test in court?

Despite recent evidence that scores on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) vary widely in adversarial legal contexts depending on which party retained the evaluator, the test has become increasingly popular in forensic work. In Texas, indeed, Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) evaluators are required by statute to measure psychopathy; almost all use this test. It is not surprising that prosecutors find the PCL-R particularly attractive: Evidence of high psychopathy has a powerfully prejudicial impact on jurors deciding whether a capital case defendant or a convicted sex offender is at high risk for bad conduct in the future.

But a current effort by the instrument's author, Robert Hare, to suppress publication of a critical article in a leading scientific journal may paradoxically reduce the credibility of the construct of psychopathy in forensic contexts.

That's the opinion of two psychology-law leaders, psychologist Norman Poythress and attorney John Petrila of the University of South Florida (two authors of a leading forensic psychology text, Psychological Evaluations for the Courts), in a critical analysis of Dr. Hare's threat to sue the journal Psychological Assessment. The contested article, "Is Criminal Behavior a Central Component of Psychopathy? Conceptual Directions for Resolving the Debate," is authored by prominent scholars Jennifer Skeem of UC Irvine and David Cooke of Glasgow University. The study remains unpublished.

"[T]he threat of litigation constitutes a serious threat to academic freedom and potentially to scientific progress," write Poythress and Petrila in the current issue of the International Journal of Forensic Mental Health. "Academic freedom rests on the premise that advances in science can only occur if scholars are permitted to pursue free competition among ideas. This assumes that scholars have the liberty to do their work free from limitations imposed by political or religious pressure or by economic reprisals."

According to Poythress and Petrila, after the critical article passed the peer-review process and was accepted for publication, Dr. Hare's lawyer sent a letter to the authors and the journal stating that Dr. Hare and his company would "have no choice but to seek financial damages from your publication and from the authors of the article, as well as a public retraction of the article" if it was published. The letter claimed that Skeem and Cooke's paper was "fraught with misrepresentations and other problems and a completely inaccurate summary of what amounts to [Hare's] life's work" and "deliberately fabricated or altered quotes of Dr. Hare, and substantially altered the sense of what Dr. Hare said in his previous publications."

In general, defamation claims must prove that a defendant made a false and defamatory statement that harmed the plaintiff's reputation. Truth is an absolute defense. Critical opinions are also protected from defamation actions, as are "fair comments" on matters of public interest.

In this case, the contents of Skeem and Cooke's contested article have not been made public. However, it is hard to see how critical analysis of a construct that is enjoying such unprecedented popularity and real-world impact would NOT be of public interest.

Poythress and Petrila express concern that defamation claims against opposing researchers, while traditionally rare, may be becoming more common, leading to a potentially chilling effect on both individual researchers and the broader scientific community. Like so-called SLAPPS -- Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation -- used by corporations and other special interest groups to impede public participation, even meritless defamation lawsuits extract heavy penalties in terms of lost time and money and emotional distress.

Judges have been critical of pretextual deployment of defamation lawsuits, Poythress and Petrila report; a judge in one case warned that "plaintiffs cannot, simply by filing suit and crying 'character assassination!,' silence those who hold divergent views, no matter how adverse those views may be to plaintiffs' interests. Scientific controversies must be settled by the methods of science rather than by the methods of litigation."

Potential negative effects of defamation threats against scientific researchers include:

1. Researchers avoid conducting critical research out of fear of lawsuits.
2. Academics decline to serve as volunteer peer reviewers for academic journals due to loss of anonymity in defamation suits.
3. Journal editors self-censor on controversial topics.

As Poythress and Petrila conclude:

Because publication of the article by Professors Skeem and Cooke has effectively been long delayed, if not ultimately suppressed, one clear impact of this threat to sue is that researchers who may have been willing to investigate alternative models of psychopathy that might have been derived from the Skeem and Cooke article are not able to do so, simply because the article is unavailable. Because science progresses, in part, both by confirming viable models and disconfirming nonviable ones, the suppression of information relevant to constructing candidate models for empirical evaluation can be viewed as impeding the progress of science….

[I]t seems clear from our review that such threats strike at the heart of the peer review process, may have a chilling effect on the values at the core of academic freedom, and may potentially impede the scientific testing of various theories, models and products. In our view it is far better to debate such matters in peer review journals rather than cut off debate through threats of litigation.

In court, meanwhile, the effects of Dr. Hare's threat may prove paradoxical. Attorneys whose clients could be prejudiced by introduction of the Psychopathy Checklist may be able to discredit the instrument by pointing to the suppression of critical literature about the underlying construct of psychopathy.

POSTSCRIPT: Just hours after I posted this, alert readers advised me that: (1) Dr. Skeem discusses the as-yet-unpublished article in her 2009 book, Psychological Science in the Courtroom: Consensus and Controversy, co-authored by Kevin Douglas and Scott O. Lilienfeld (page 179 in the Google book view is HERE), and (2) according to Dr. Hare's website, he has a response in press (which, ironically, cites the Skeem and Cooke article as being published last year).

The full article is: "PCL-R Psychopathy: Threats to Sue, Peer Review, and Potential Implications for Science and Law. A Commentary," by Norman Poythress and John P. Petrila, in the current issue of the International Journal of Forensic Mental Health. The abstract if available HERE; the full article requires a subscription.

Dr. Hare's response is: "The role of antisociality in the psychopathy construct: Comment on Skeem & Cooke (2009)." Hare, R. D., & Neumann, C. S. (in press). Psychological Assessment.

Of related interest:

• "The Dark Side of Peer Review," by Stephen D. Hart, also in the current issue of the International Journal of Forensic Mental Health (abstract HERE)

• "Does interrater (dis)agreement on Psychopathy Checklist scores in Sexually Violent Predator trials suggest partisan allegiance in forensic evaluations?" by Murrie, D.C., Boccaccini, M.T., Johnson, J.T., & Janke, C. (2008). Law & Human Behavior, 32, 352-362 (abstract HERE)