ABSTRACT Although ethical and methodological challenges of conducting research with vulnerable populations are widely acknowledged, there are fewer discussions on the unique difficulties encountered by researchers while working with prisoners sentenced to death and their families. This paper presents the reflective accounts of two researchers’ fieldwork experience, highlighting the ethical concerns

ABSTRACT Abusive Head Trauma (AHT) is a medical diagnosis which indicates that accidents, diseases, or other medical conditions do not plausibly explain a child’s injuries. While psychologists may be involved in AHT cases, they do not generally evaluate children at the time injuries caused by AHT occur and they do not diagnose those injuries. This article is a commentary on Johnson et al, which advises

ABSTRACT Confession evidence is powerful to jurors, even when obtained using psychologically coercive means. To assist jurors in evaluating confession evidence, courts may provide instructions or expert testimony. The current study examined the relative effectiveness of these two safeguards. Participants were randomly assigned to read about a confession that either did or did not result from the use

ABSTRACT Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that leads to the disease COVID-19, has resulted in significant challenges for the medical and psychiatric communities. Much like other clinicians during this global pandemic, forensic evaluators have been faced with the difficult task of continuing their clinical work, while helping to maintain the safety of their examinees

ABSTRACT Psychological tests to detect malingered or feigned symptoms of mental illness are critical in the assessment of forensic patients. The Miller Forensic Assessment of Symptoms Test (M-FAST) is a validated screening test for identifying malingered mental illness. The objective of this study was to translate, adapt, and validate the M-FAST into Armenian. Fifty-four psychiatric patients and 54

ABSTRACT Adjudicative competence evaluations are the most common forensic evaluation to occur in the United States. As a result of these evaluations, pretrial defendants are often found to be incompetent to stand trial and ordered for competency restoration, with psychotic symptoms as a major barrier to competency. Traditional competency restoration services are sometimes insufficient for restoring

ABSTRACT Countertransference can instigate poor or even iatrogenic treatment effects. This study investigated the extent to which psychotic symptoms, inpatient violence and disruptive behavior, and psychopathic/antisocial personality traits are associated with countertransference. Eighty-nine patients with psychotic disorders in a forensic medium-secure unit were assessed twice for countertransference

ABSTRACT Data collected by the State of Missouri Department of Mental Health were used to analyze trends and characteristics of criminal responsibility evaluations by Certified Forensic Evaluators in Missouri. Using data from Fiscal Year 2003 to Fiscal Year 2018, analyses focused on the following: (a) the relationship between diagnosis and criminal responsibility opinion, (b) the rates of criminal

ABSTRACT Research exploring the experiences of men who have stalked is lacking, specifically how they construe their reality for stalking episodes. Addressing this absence of experiential expert contribution was the pivotal and timely aim of this research, given interventions for stalking are under-developed. Seven in-depth interviews were conducted with men convicted of stalking and held in UK prisons

ABSTRACT Risk assessment and threat management are important components of crime control and crime prevention, with the results of assessments having a significant impact on personal and community safety. There may also be important legal implications arising from these if individuals are deemed to be a risk to others. There is evidence showing that traditional risk assessment tools do not consider

ABSTRACT Unpaid carers, in the UK, are estimated to contribute 132 billion pounds to society, often at a cost to their own physical and mental wellbeing. Therefore, various governmental directives since 1995 have focused on recognizing the significant contribution made by carers by improving their involvement in services. Carer research within mental health has focused primarily on general mental health

ABSTRACT Forensic professionals have a unique role due to the precarious balance between providing care and enforcing control. In the Netherlands, the term “forensische scherpte”, which we translated as “forensic vigilance”, is widely used to indicate a core competency professionals require during work in forensic psychiatric settings. However, a clear definition and understanding of the construct

ABSTRACT One of the problems that arise in the Family Courts is the constant complaints of one parent about the other (judicial harassment) up to the children’s age of majority or, in some extreme cases, even harming the children to attack the parent who usually has custody. This behavior is typical of Machiavellian progenitors, but this connection has hardly been studied in the literature. The aim

ABSTRACT Adaptations are frequently made by hospital administrators, clinicians, and other staff to accommodate for the changing populations of state psychiatric hospitals in the United States. For example, many mental health treatments, including evidence-based treatments, have been adapted for use with forensic patients and in forensic settings. Specialized ethical guidance has also been developed

ABSTRACT Across two studies, we investigated the effect of alibi corroborator age on alibi assessment. In Study 1, we examined the impact of the alibi corroborator’s age (i.e., 8- vs. 25-year-old) and relationship with the suspect (i.e., stranger vs. neighbor vs. son) on five dependent measures related to corroborator credibility and suspect guilt. In Study 2, we examined the impact of the corroborator’s

ABSTRACT This descriptive study aimed to investigate how often pretrial forensic psychiatric examinations in Denmark included psychological assessments; particularly, the Test of Memory Malingering (TOMM) – a performance validity test – and Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology (SIMS) – a symptom validity test. The circumstances associated with the administration of these tests, including

ABSTRACT This study adapts and validates a scale designed to measure Attitudes Toward Mentally Disordered Offenders (ATMDO). It is thought that by monitoring and subsequently improving attitudes, negative potentially damaging milieus within criminal justice, forensic mental health, and society in general can be minimized. Participants (N = 364) were recruited via snowball technique and data collected

ABSTRACT In Drope v. Missouri (1975), the Supreme Court expanded the standard for competency outlined in Dusky v. United States (1960) requiring that judges be attuned to changes in defendants’ presentations throughout court proceedings, including following competency restoration. As such, concerns about competency to stand trial must be raised even for those defendants previously found competent or

ABSTRACT Despite a voluminous literature recognizing the challenges and stresses facing correctional officers, few programs exist to preventatively help correctional officers with their mental health, and of the existing programs few are designed specifically for correctional officers or have any evidence-based data available that speaks to their effectiveness. In the current study, we start to fill

ABSTRACT Juvenile adjudicative competency evaluations are on the rise, but basing decisions of competency on developmental factors remains highly debated. Most states do not provide explicit guidelines to address developmental factors within juvenile competency statutes despite substantial evidence demonstrating the impact of age and developmental immaturity on competence-related functional abilities

ABSTRACT Personality disorders (PDs) are ingrained dysfunctional patterns of cognition, emotion, and behavior. PDs, especially Cluster B PDs, are related to an increased violence risk and are highly prevalent in offender populations. Patients with PDs may suffer from dysregulated affect in a sense that they experience many maladaptive emotional states and relatively few healthy emotional states. It

ABSTRACT Sex offenders commonly exhibit some degree of denial of their offending. Past research has shown that denial conflicts with treatment completion, but does not necessarily increase sexual reoffending risk. This study explores whether the impact of denial upon the treatment of sex offenders is unequivocal or influenced by other factors, such as criminal career variables and dynamic risk. Thirty-five

ABSTRACT In attempts to identify and remove biased individuals from a pool of potential jurors, attorneys have resorted to real-time social media investigations, looking at the opinions and affiliations of candidates. Attorneys’ conclusions are based less on founded research and more on their own personal opinions and common-sense theories. This study investigated the relationship between self-reported

ABSTRACT Objective: Higher prevalence of traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been reported for detained individuals. TBI may result in erroneously interpreting situations in everyday life, impair problem-solving abilities through dialogue, or negotiation, which may increase aggressive behavior. Knowledge of TBI and its consequences in Dutch penitentiaries is lacking, as virtually no screening, supervision

ABSTRACT Risk assessment instruments are widely used to predict risk of adverse outcomes, such as violence or victimization, and to allocate resources for managing these risks among individuals involved in criminal justice and forensic mental health services. For risk assessment instruments to reach their full potential, they must be implemented with fidelity. A lack of information on administration

ABSTRACT Various studies have examined intelligent quotients (IQs) in samples of pedophiles and child molesters. However, intelligence is not a monolithic construct; rather, it is made up of different dimensions, including emotional intelligence (EI). Although emotional intelligence has been studied in relation to criminal behavior, there is little knowledge available on EI in samples of child molesters

ABSTRACT Forensic psychiatry and forensic psychology study the link between mental health and the law. These forensic behavioral sciences play a vital role when assessing both a person’s competency to stand trial and the degree to which criminal responsibility can be attributed to the perpetrator of alleged offenses by the criminal justice system. Offenders with a suspected intellectual disability

ABSTRACT Whether risk factors for recidivism are equally predictive in different offender groups and across recidivism types is a question of high clinical importance. Therefore, this study aimed to examine (a) differences in impact of general delinquency risk factors for three different recidivism types, and (b) differences in the presence of general delinquency risk factors between five different

ABSTRACT Thomas Quick of Sweden confessed to over thirty murders between 1993 and 2000, and was convicted of eight of them over the course of six trials in Sweden. All the convictions relied on his blurred confessions. He has since – between 2011 and 2013 – been exonerated for all of them. This case report will provide a detailed account of a real life case where the psychiatric patient has kept notes

ABSTRACT Assessment of response style is a vital component of forensic assessment. However, the focus on malingering in the literature and test offerings has predictable and negative consequences: Because the label of malingering is viewed as toxic, tests designed to assess for it are often long and sacrifice sensitivity to minimize false-positive errors. Rather than focusing on diagnosing or ruling

ABSTRACT Psychologists as experts may be engaged in criminal or family court cases involving Shaken Baby Syndrome/Abusive Head Trauma (SBS/AHT). There are unsettled questions within medical specialties regarding the diagnosis of SBS/AHT, as well as the mechanisms and timing of injuries. Psychologists need to be cautious about providing testimony based on findings from disciplines other than psychology

ABSTRACT Identities change after major interpersonal events. However, there is comparatively little study of what identity change means after the commission of an act of severe interpersonal violence, such as homicide. Individual in-depth interviews with men who had taken a life were conducted, looking at the experience of living with and making sense of their offense. The interviews were transcribed

ABSTRACT This exploratory study aimed to evaluate the effects of conflictual separation and divorce on children’s representations of self and of family relationships in child custody evaluations. Forty-seven school-aged children, assessed in the course of civil separation procedures characterized by high levels of marital conflict (high conflict group), and a control group (low conflict group, n=47)

ABSTRACT The competence to stand trial literature is vast, whereas the literature on competency restoration pales in comparison. Although such research has accumulated since the 1970s, no quantative synthesis of it has been conducted. Therefore, we considered over 1,000 publications and attempted to conduct the first meta-analysis of restoration data – using 51 independent competency restoration samples

ABSTRACT Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) is the gold standard for assessing psychopathy. However, its factorial structure has been subject of debate, and different factor models have been proposed. Furthermore, research has not focused on the PCL-R factorial structure among intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetrators. We analyzed and compared the fit of nine alternative models of PCL-R among

ABSTRACT Both, the number of people wearing visible body modifications, e.g., tattoos, and their acceptance in society have been significantly increased. Thus, rules and regulations of German police officers’ appearance prohibiting to show tattoos during police services are challenged. Basically, such standards aim to minimize risk factors in police service and to maximize safety at work, thus fostering

ABSTRACT Studies have demonstrated that the mere mention of criminal risk factors for future violent criminal behavior predicted decisions to detain or release not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder (NCRMD) patients following their review board hearing. We looked to further our understanding of review board decisions by assessing the influence of the mention of risk factors as well

ABSTRACT In the present study, we have taken a novel approach in confession research to investigate and compare situational as well as individual risk factors among false confessors and true deniers among imprisoned offenders who all had been falsely accused by the police. Furthermore, we report first data on self-reported false confession rates among German prison inmates. A semi-structured interview

ABSTRACT Do surveillance shots and phantom drawings of the perpetrator in child abuse cases, images that are widely published in public media, contaminate the identifications made by young victims? This question was raised in the later phases of the investigations into a Norwegian child abuse case that involved a large number of victims, where a suspect was apprehended, and a photo lineup with the

ABSTRACT This study examined whether individuals who were assaultive at a forensic psychiatric inpatient hospital were more likely to be referred for malingering assessment and whether there was a difference in assaultive behavior between individuals who had non-valid test performance (NVTP) on Performance Validity Tests (PVTs) and those who demonstrated valid test performance (VTP). Of 136 assessments

ABSTRACT When interpreting a natural language argument that generalizes over a contextually relevant category, audiences are likely to activate the category prototype and transfer its characteristics onto category instances. A generalized argument can thus appear more (respectively less) persuasive than one mentioning a specific category instance, provided the argument’s claim is more (less) warranted

ABSTRACT This meta-analysis aimed to examine the effectiveness of the Historical Clinical Risk-20 violence management tool for predicting violence in adult female populations. The HCR-20 is a well-known tool which has been predominantly developed and validated on males. To date, there have been no published systematic reviews explicitly explore all generations of the HCR-20 and the predictive validity

ABSTRACT The Strategic Use of Evidence (SUE) technique is a promising suspect interviewing approach that takes the potentially incriminating information against a suspect (i.e., the evidence) into account and aims at actively eliciting diagnostic cues to deception and truth. The technique was successfully tested in multiple research studies and has been introduced to practitioners in different parts

ABSTRACT This study examined the clinical utility of a meditation, mindfulness, and mantra intervention for youth experiencing serious mental illness while incarcerated. Participants were 17 adolescent males, aged 16 to 18, from two units of a county detention center in the San Francisco Bay Area. Eleven (64.7%) participants were Latino-American, one (5.9 %) was Black/African American, three (17.6

ABSTRACT Hyperarousal and attention problems as a result of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are being recognized as a risk for offense recidivism. Short-term Music therapy Attention and Arousal Regulation Treatment (SMAART) was designed as a first step intervention to address responsivity and treatment needs of prisoners who were not eligible for or unwilling to undergo eye movement desensitization

ABSTRACT Deception is a phenomenon found within the practice of psychology. Beyond malingering, there are other reasons for people to lie within legal contexts. Therapists who work in legal contexts may be presented with deception within various aspects of practice. Previous research has indicated that non-forensic therapists held a number of inaccurate beliefs about indicators of deception and negative

ABSTRACT The purpose of this research is to name the symptoms and signs of S&M, defined as a mental disorder and a deviant behavior pattern, and to determine their role in shaping violent sex motivation. Our theory follows from criminological and psycho-psychiatric research that was about questioning 132 persons, who committed violent sex crimes, reviewing their medical histories and mental health

ABSTRACT In this study, we examined the psychometric properties of the French Health of the Nation Outcome Scale-Secure (HoNOS-Secure) in a Belgian Community and Medium Secure Unit sample of patients with psychotic disorders (n = 189). Results suggests that individual HoNOS-Secure items have poor interrater reliability. HoNOS-Secure Behavior and Impairment subscales have good reliability, while others

ABSTRACT As suggested by previous research, the study of personality traits among sexual offenders could be an important consideration in the understanding of sexual offending. This study aims to explore the possibility of classifying sexual offenders according to their personality profiles. Based on the MCMI-III scores of 97 convicted contact sexual offenders, a cluster hierarchical analysis was performed

ABSTRACT Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder affects an estimated 3–5% of the population and results in numerous functional deficits in cognitive, social, and adaptive skills. Additionally, it is estimated that 60% of those who have FASD will become involved in the criminal justice system at some point in their life. Given the high percentage of those with FASD who become involved in the criminal justice

ABSTRACT Although research highlights the influence of individual and case characteristics on outcomes of competence to stand trial (CST), mental state at the time of the offense (MSO), and combined evaluations (CST and MSO), we know little about differences in these characteristics across referral type. Using a sample of 2,655 evaluations in Virginia over a 15-year span, we examined demographic, clinical

ABSTRACT Unlike assessments in other fields of psychology, forensic mental health assessment (FMHA) does not emphasize feedback. The Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, Specialty Guidelines for Forensic Psychology, and foundational FMHA texts provide little guidance regarding whether and what type of feedback can be provided to forensic evaluees. Mirroring the trend in academic

ABSTRACT A democratic prison Therapeutic Community (TC) aims to facilitate personal growth through enhanced interpersonal relationships. This study used a four category model of adult attachment to assess TC offenders’ relationships, obtained from a novel self-report method (a card sorting task). Four styles of attachment were empirically evidenced and an examination of individual attachment styles

ABSTRACT Assaults in psychiatric hospitals are problematic for vulnerable patients, staff, and the treatment system as a whole. This study reflects the challenges state hospitals experience managing risk by evaluating differing legal statuses and comorbid diagnoses to demonstrate their differential impact on behavior while hospitalized. Assault data from 4495 admissions was gathered over eight years

ABSTRACT Evidence shows substance use disorders and mental health conditions are linked to an increased probability of jail readmission, but many local facilities do not have the resources to conduct comprehensive behavioral health assessments. This prospective longitudinal study examined the utility of a nine-item screen to identify adults with a high probability of readmission. Results from a sample

ABSTRACT Child welfare agencies and legal authorities have frequently turned to psychologists to conduct parental competency assessments (PCA) to inform decisions aimed to advocate the best interests of children and protect them from maltreatment. The Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory–Third Edition (MCMI-III) is an empirically supported measure that is commonly used in the context of these examinations

ABSTRACT Recovery has become a guiding principle for mental health service delivery. However, the implementation of recovery-oriented services is hindered by conceptual multiplicity, and forensic services in particular face additional challenges. The perspectives of both those receiving and providing services are central in understanding how the recovery approach can best be supported in practice.

ABSTRACT Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA) is an initiative designed to support those previously convicted of sexual offenses as they reintegrate back into society, while still holding them accountable for their thoughts and behavior. The aim of the research was to explore the Core Member and volunteer experience of being involved in a CoSA that transitions from prison to community, with

ABSTRACT Forensic psychologists and psychiatrists are regularly called upon to conduct sexually violent predator (SVP) evaluations. Commonly, the DSM-5 diagnostic category of paraphilic disorders is used to establish whether an offender has a mental abnormality outlined by the SVP laws. Importantly, the use of paraphilic disorders to establish the mental abnormality criterion has given rise to several

ABSTRACT Guilty pleas account for the vast majority of criminal convictions, yet experimental research on this topic is surprisingly uncommon; furthermore, race is seldom examined in the existing body of experimental studies. The current study utilized a 2 (Participant Race: White, non-White) X 2 (Defendant Culpability: Guilty, Innocent) between-subjects factorial design to investigate mock-defendant