Forensic Psychology For Dummies (92 page)

For important tests that require considerable expertise, people have to achieve a special licence to be allowed to administer them, which is usually awarded when certain standards are achieved on the training course. For these tests people are only allowed to administer them if they have an up-to-date certificate.

Training in the application and administration of a psychological assessment, at the very least covers the following points

Choosing the appropriate test for the purpose at hand:
This requires an understanding of any psychological theory that underpins the test and the situations in which it has been used that reveal its validity.

Understanding how to administer the test:
Often very specific procedures apply that the tester is required to carry out for the test to maintain its reliability and validity.

Knowing how to score the test:
The way in which answers are combined to derive scores may not be a simple addition, but different answers may get different weights in various ways. So the training explains how this is done, including the different aspects of the test that can be derived separately. For instance, in the intelligence test respondents may get different scores for verbal, numerical and spatial intelligence.

Writing reports:
How the report of the test should be prepared and what headings are to be distinct for each test.

Recognising the sorts of ethical and professional issues,
such as those I describe in Chapter 17,
which include
abiding by aspects of confidentiality and how and what the person being assessed should be told.

Chapter 10

Diagnosing Evil: Measuring the Criminal Mind

In This Chapter

Addressing the difficulties of assessing an offender’s psychology

Assessing psychopathy

Determining the risk of future offending

Over the years, psychologists have developed many assessment methods specifically to describe the psychology of offenders. Most commonly, these procedures assess the risk of the individual committing another crime in the near or distant future. Other tests have been developed to explore the sexual attitudes and preferences of an individual, or an offender’s competency to understand the trial process. But dealing with offenders is a difficult area.

Forensic psychologists nearly always use these procedures alongside an in-depth interview. The tests provide a way to describe important psychological aspects of a criminal and compare those characteristics with other known offenders and the population at large. Also, these tests are of value in looking back to the original offence and helping to understand those aspects of the person that contributed to the crime occurring. The results of these assessment procedures can therefore be of great significance in the life of offenders.

Uncovering Possible Malingering

One of the crucial challenges when assessing an offender, which isn’t usually a concern with other people, is whether the person is telling the truth. This may be lying about the events surrounding the crime that I discuss in Chapter 5, but in this section, I consider the use of psychological tests in discerning whether an offender is lying about his mental state.

The use of the polygraph and other aspects of lie detection that I discuss in Chapter 5 are relevant to many aspects of crime, especially in determining whether offenders’ reports of their actions are truthful, but a quite different set of requirements emerges when a suspect claims to have some sort of mental disturbance.

As I mention in Chapter 1, one strand of forensic psychology grew out of the defence that a person was so mentally disturbed that he didn’t understand what he was doing or that it was wrong. As lawyers put it, the defendant didn’t have
mens rea
. Therefore, a strong defence can be that a person was, in common language, ‘mad’ or ‘insane’ (although as I discuss in Chapter 11 the law does not define insanity the way common language does) at the time he carried out the criminal actions, which clearly gives an incentive for criminals to malinger.

Malingering
is a way of giving information that deliberately fabricates or grossly exaggerates symptoms. Malingerers may also feign symptoms, whether physical, such as a limp, or psychological, such as pretending to hear voices.

Defendants often think that they can have the trial postponed or stopped altogether if they’re thought to be mentally ill, or at the very least receive a shorter sentence. Malingering isn’t limited to criminal cases. A person claiming compensation for injuries resulting from a car accident or an incident at work – especially when these injuries are difficult to observe as in a psychological disorder – may also be motivated to exaggerate or fake symptoms.

As a consequence, any assessment of mental state needs to take account of the possibility that a mental illness is being invented or faked in some way. Forensic psychologists often use special procedures to establish how honest any claims of mental illness may be. The most common such method is an intensive clinical interview. In this, the person is asked in a relaxed atmosphere to talk about his life and any mental issues that have affected him. The interviewer isn’t only listening carefully to the content of what’s being said, but also to the way in which the account is being given. Some indications of possible malingering are:

Dramatic or exaggerated presentation of the experiences or symptoms.

Overly careful or deliberate recounting of what has happened.

Inconsistency in what’s described compared with what’s known about the claimed psychological problems.

Reporting only well-known aspects of a recognised psychological syndrome, such as hearing voices.