Assessment Skills Lab I
Full course description
Forensic psychological assessment differs in a number of important respects from psychological assessment which occurs in a general clinical context. First of all, subjects are mandated to undergo a mental health assessment at the request of the court, which may adversely affect their willingness to participate and lead to distorted response styles. In contrast, in most other assessment contexts, the subject is seeking help and is open to discuss his/her problems with the assessor.
Secondly, the forensic psychologist is asked to answer questions that are posed by the court, which requires the psychologist to ‘translate’ legal questions into questions that a psychologist can answer. Finally, the forensic psychologist needs to be able to administer, code, and interpret specific forensic assessment instruments (FAIs), relevant to the type of legal questions asked. Among these, the question of psychopathy is highly prominent.
Psycholegal questions posed to the assessment psychologist are very different from the common questions in other fields of psychology. Examples include: Is there a relationship between the mental disorder of this subject and his behaviour during the crime? What is the risk of future re-offending in this arsonist? Is it safe to allow this sex offender back into the community? The answers to these types of questions are never immediately at hand and require extensive knowledge of offender typologies, base rates of recidivism of different offender types, relationships between different mental disorder symptoms and offending behaviours, and extensive psychological assessment, employing the relevant FAIs.
Students will receive specialised training in two essential forensic assessment instruments: the Psychopathy Check List-Revised and the PCL: Youth Version. They will also learn how to write up the results of these assessments in a structured and transparent forensic report.
- knowledge of specific requirements of personality assessment in a forensic context (e.g., multimethod assessment; the importance of collateral information; conducting a biographical interview with a forensic patient; use of semi-structured methods, founding of diagnostic conclusions in evidential facts);
- apply the Psychopathy Check List-Revised and Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version to assess the level of psychopathic traits in individuals;
- generate an accurate and concise personality description of an individual based on the results derived from the Psychopathy Checklist.