Why are people bad: Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS)
Working in criminal forensic psychology, a lot of attention is devoted to the role of psychosis in criminal offenses. In Hawaii law, based on the Model Penal Code of the American Law Institute, a person is not criminally responsible (insane) when their cognitive and/or volitional capacities were substantially impaired by a physical or mental disease, […]
More on Validity Scales
The issue of validity scales and their use in psychological assessments, especially in situations where “situational demands” are intense (e.g., child custody, child welfare, employee selection) has really gotten my attention. Here is a proposal we are submitting for a presentation next March in Boston. Symposium Proposal–Society for Personality Assessment Annual Meeting–Boston, MA March 2011 […]
Parental Alienation Syndrome
Today’s (Saturday, 10/2/2010) Honolulu Star-Bulletin (p. A5) announces a major conference on parental alienation syndrome (PAS), being held this weekend in NYC (www.cspas.ca). As you may be aware there is an effort underway to place PAS into the DSM-V. There are no cases that a forensic psychologist is likely to encounter, even grisly homicides, that are […]
Work in progress: Self-report Validity Indicators
Over the years, as my psychological assessment work transformed from primarily clinical to primarily forensic, we began to notice the impact on self-report validity scales (L, K, PIM, NIM, etc.); namely, they tended to elevate in evaluation contexts where the outcome depended on a positive picture, in the under-reporting direction (so called “fake good”). Impression management has […]