M3_A1
Module 3 Overview
In Module 3, you will focus on gathering information from first- and second-hand sources. The module will emphasize the importance of relying on all sources of information, particularly the interview and collateral information, when conducting a psychological assessment in forensic settings.
The interview portion of the psychological assessment is invaluable in several ways. First, it gives you an opportunity to get information from the source in question—the client. The client’s account of the offense, motivation, and perception of the situation will determine the style of questioning and information gathering most appropriate for the goals and objectives of the forensic evaluation. For example, if your client is direct and forthcoming with information, you may have to spend less time in building rapport and can then proceed with the queries relevant to your referral question. On the other hand, if you encounter a client who is resistant or abrasive, noncompliant, and evasive about his or her history and situation, you may have to be less structured and focus on building rapport and trust in order to proceed with the interview.
A face-to-face meeting will also yield important mental status information concerning the client. This is where you may find psychotic processes, cognitive and memory issues, and delusional or paranoid belief systems as possible influences on criminal offenses and indicators of the individual's ability to engage in a psychological assessment. In addition, you may determine how appropriate it is to use psychological tests based on the mental status of the client. For example, if a client is incoherent, delirious, paranoid, or delusional, testing may yield invalid results, thereby unnecessarily exposing the client to the rigors of personality testing.
Explain the major methods and instruments in forensic assessment and apply the use of those methods and instruments to appropriate forensic client populations and relevant decision points in criminal and civil legal proceedings.
Analyze forensic cases and scenarios appropriately assessed by the clinical interview, mental status examination, behavioral observations, and standard and accepted psychological tests as they apply to clients in forensic settings.
Identify and provide a brief description of how it might affect your findings if any potential issues with offender behaviors associated with malingering and deception exist.
Synthesize individual assessment and evaluation data, reports, and third-party information to create appropriate reports and recommendations to the court and other relevant parties regarding the disposition of cases.
Behavioral Observations
While an interview is a necessary source of information in the forensic assessment, collateral information is equally important. Often, clients will fail to report or will underreport important information in their cases. This may result in invalid assessment results and inappropriate application of punishment, rehabilitation, and treatment.
For example, consider the case of a young woman who not only appeared depressed in your office but also has a history of depression. She has no criminal history, and she committed a crime entirely uncharacteristic of her. She committed a credit card fraud on an impulse. The interview confirms a history of depression but not the aggression, impulsivity, and recklessness present during her commission of the crime. Her family members are not aware of any previous incidents of such activity, and they have no explanation for what might have caused such a change in her behavior. Your interview finds no psychosis, delusional processes, delirium, or incoherence.
There are several possibilities to explain what may have influenced her criminal activity. She has a history of depression and is at an age when the onset of hypomania is possible. Since it is common for bipolar clients to underreport mania and hypomania, she may not have ever reported similar experiences to her treatment providers in previous episodes of treatment. This is confirmed when you receive collateral reports from her previous treatment providers. None indicate the presence of manic or hypomanic symptoms. However, when you receive the report from the correction facility, you find sound evidence of several hypomanic episodes during her incarceration. Given her age, the usual underreporting of hypomanic symptoms in clinical settings, and evidentiary collateral information, you have the confidence to formulate a hypothesis and diagnostic impressions surrounding bipolar II disorder and may choose the appropriate psychological tests for use in this case.
This module will help you learn about the appropriate uses of interview and collateral data as they relate to mental status and behavioral observations of clients in assessments. You should pay special attention to the differences between mental status and behavioral observation data and the methods used to incorporate these into assessment reports. You will also learn about personality testing as a crucial component of psychological evaluations in forensic settings.
Objective and Projective Tests
In this module, you will explore the differences between objective and projective tests. Objective personality testing is a substantial component of most comprehensive psychological evaluations. It provides valid and reliable data, often difficult to collect and assess, during the time psychology professionals and mental health professionals are working to gather history and mental status information.
Objective personality testing, as the term "objective" implies, refers to a means of quantifying an individual's personality functioning that is minimally impacted by examiner bias. Of course, it is not possible to eliminate testing bias completely, but objective tests can come close. Objective test questions are usually true or false, multiple choice, or, occasionally, fill in the blanks. The responses of one person to your objective personality test questions should be the same or similar to the responses of another person to the test questions and should have the same meaning for both. The element of the evaluator's subjective evaluation of test data is ideally removed from the assessment equation through the use of objective personality tests.
When it comes to psychological assessment, the opposite of objective personality tests is not subjective personality tests but rather projective personality tests. The key word in understanding the concept of projective personality tests is "project." In this sense, it does not refer to a task but instead to the way in which a projector can project an image. In theory, projective personality tests allow an individual to "project" aspects of his or her personality onto an object. The premise is that an individual views all objects from the lens of his or her own personality and experiences. For example, showing an adult a picture of a sleeping child might evoke memories and images of his or her own childhood. If the individual had been molested as a child, he or she might describe the scene as one of a child who is pretending to be asleep in the hopes that the molester will not come into his or her room that night.
In some cases, a forensic report might include objective personality tests without any projective personality tests. However, only in rare cases would a forensic report include projective personality tests without any objective personality tests. The reason for that difference is that typically projective personality tests are used to supplement information from objective personality tests rather than the other way around.
What factors should you consider while choosing between a projective test and an objective test? Deciding which tests to use when assessing personality or cognition is dependent on several factors:
A thorough knowledge of the norm sample is very important because it dictates whether the comparison between your respondents and the norms is appropriate and will yield valid results.
Also, the “process” of the testing is important to consider. If you have a respondent with a low-level English, then choosing a test that is nonverbal or written in his or her native language would be more appropriate.
Personality Testing
This module introduces you to the history and development of personality tests and reviews the concepts of validity and reliability as they relate to personality testing. You will learn how to select which psychological tests best address the referral question and offer information useful to the third party requesting the evaluation.
Much like intelligence testing evolved in an attempt to quantify the intellectual capacity of an individual, personality testing emerged from a similar paradigm, in that it attempts to answer the question, what "makes a person tick"? In fact, no other area of testing can reveal more about the core aspects of functioning of an individual than personality testing. Personality testing attempts to tell us why people behave the way they do, what interests them, and what motivates them. For example, personality testing can tell us whether a person finds changes exciting or unsettling, whether a person is more of an introvert or an extrovert, whether a person has high or low frustration tolerance, or whether a person is more of a perfectionist or easygoing.
The major premise behind personality testing is that no individual has full insight at any given time into all aspects of his or her personality, such as his or her attributes and motivations. In some cases, a person might simply be unaware of the reasons for his or her behavior. For example, an individual who is late to work every time an evaluation by the supervisor is in the offing might not realize that he or she is late due to anxiety about the upcoming evaluation. In other cases, a person might mistakenly believe things about his or her personality that are not accurate. For example, a person might believe that he or she handles stress extremely well while his or her friends and family would disagree. So personality testing has arisen from the need to gain insight into an individual that could otherwise not be obtained.
Again, similar to intelligence testing, personality testing is by no means an exact science. However, over the years, tests have become increasingly sophisticated to aid evaluators in identifying subtle nuances in the differences in functioning of one individual from the other. For example, personality tests can now detect whether people are attempting to portray themselves in a favorable light or whether people are attempting to present themselves as somehow impaired.
Forensic Applications
Personality testing is a crucial component of psychological evaluations in forensic settings. It is important because of the nature of the information it can provide. Personality testing in a forensic setting has a range of uses. It is needed to confirm the suspicions of either the prosecution or the defense or to understand prior behavior.
It is most commonly used to detect psychopathy among offenders, which refers to a pervasive pattern of behaviors involving intentions to harm others, lack of remorse, dishonesty, manipulation, and superficial charm. Diagnostically, psychopathic individuals are described as having antisocial personality disorder. Because psychopathic individuals are so dangerous in society, the ability to detect them in a forensic setting should not be underutilized.
In addition, personality testing in a forensic setting can help identify whether people are engaging in deception in their presentations. It helps minimize the outcomes when those being assessed in this setting make the attempt, for obvious secondary gain, to distort information on evaluations requested by third parties. While deception in one's presentation is not necessarily indicative of psychopathy, it certainly could be. In some cases, individuals may attempt to present themselves unfavorably in an effort to try to seem not responsible for their charges. In other cases, individuals may attempt to present themselves as more favorable in an effort to try to appear as though their risk of reoffending is lower than it actually is.
This type of testing can also help to shed light on whether an individual's personality functioning is due to the effects of substance use. For example, an offender recently brought to jail may seem psychotic according to personality tests but after a month of being in jail (and accordingly a month of sobriety) may reveal normal functioning on being administered the same personality tests because the individual is no longer being affected by the substances he or she had been using.
Most importantly, personality assessment in a forensic setting can reveal whether an individual may have psychotic disorder. Individuals with psychotic disorder would present as extremely disorganized and chaotic in their responses on personality tests. Particularly on projective tests, some of their responses might even seem bizarre. For example, a psychotic individual might describe an innocuous picture of a house nestled in the woods as a scene of conspiracy by or toward the people living in it or bizarre happenings, such as aliens living in the house.
Conclusion
While psychological testing serves a distinct purpose in forensic evaluations, it is only one component of a comprehensive evaluation process. It should never be relied upon as the sole method for making determinations about a client's behavior, competence, intelligence, or cognitive abilities. For example, some objective personality tests that were developed using Caucasian groups tend to make non-Caucasian individuals appear as having more negative personality traits, such as psychopathy or aggression. Sometimes, individuals who seem to be making themselves appear favorably on personality tests might be doing so out of anxiety rather than an attempt to avoid responsibility for their charges. Therefore, all personality test results must be interpreted in accordance with collateral information and the clinical interview. Test data alone is simply not sufficient for an evaluation.
This module will involve you in discussions and readings that will allow you to explore and analyze the benefits of objective and projective test data in forensic assessments. You will have the opportunity to learn the process of test selection on the basis of the referral question, the setting in which you will present your assessment report, and the information you hope to obtain from the test.
