Forensic Psychology

This chapter analyzes the current state of research on the topic of age stereotypes and age discrimination in the workplace. Recognizing the growing importance of age stereotyping research as the workforces of many countries continue to grow older, this chapter defines and differentiates the important concepts used in this field of research (e.g., age stereotyping, ageism, age discrimination). Specific illustrations of age stereotyping are identified, and it is shown how these stereotypes can have negative impacts on both workers and their employers. The relationship between age stereotyping and age discrimination is discussed with reference to recent court cases. A meta-framework that provides guidance for future research is offered to enhance the coordinated growth of research in this field. Finally, specifi c directions for future research and best practices for organizations are identified.

Statutory, judicial, and regulatory law in the United States serves as a model for other countries as regards workplace discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, disability, and age. This chapter focuses on the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA) and related statutes. Case law related to disparate treatment, adverse impact, and facial discrimination against older workers is surveyed, particularly as relates to hiring and termination of individuals, maximum hiring and retirement, discrimination in health and retirement benefits, and reductions-in-force (RIFs). Recommendations are provided for correcting false ageist attitudes among front-line employers, managers, and supervisors; for conducting fair and efficient performance appraisals of workers of all ages; and for applying a specific strategy for conducting a fair and legal RIF.

Despite their best intentions, practitioners of personality assessment sometimes painfully discover they have paid insufficient attention to what they should or should not have done. This article addresses ways in which personality assessors can anticipate ethical and legal challenges, and, by so doing, avoid them. The American Psychological Association's Ethical Principles and Code of Conduct is an ethics code that rests on the fundamental requirement for psychologists to be knowledgeable and responsible professionals who respect the rights and dignity of others, show concern for the welfare of their clients and colleagues, and present themselves fairly and honestly to their patients and their communities. Five sequential phases of clinical personality assessment, in each of which lurk some ethical and legal hazards, must be considered: accepting a referral; selecting the test battery; conducting the psychological testing; preparing and presenting a report; and managing case records.

Research has shown aggression toward others is a problem in a subset of military veterans. Predicting this kind of aggression would be immensily helpful in clinical settings. To our knowledge, there currently are no risk assessment tools or screens that have been validated to specifically evaluate acute violence among veterans. This chapter reviews what we do and do not know about violence in veterans so that clinicians who are making decisions about acute violence can be informed by the existing scientific knowledge base. Examining these empirically supported risk and protective factors using a systematic approach may optimize clinical decision making when assessing acute violence in veterans.

Feigned-symptom reports have become of increasing interest in recent years, in part because the results of psychological evaluations are more widely accepted in legal proceedings. This article examines several pertinent issues regarding assessment of malingering, including methodological concerns, base rates of feigning, and coaching to avoid detection. It evaluates several frequently used measures of malingering, including the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2), Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI), Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-III, Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology, Miller Forensic Assessment of Symptoms Test, and Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms (SIRS). The article provides cutting scores, sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive powers at various base rates of feigning. After the SIRS, the feigning scales of the MMPI-2 have the most support for malingering detection, followed by the PAI scales. Generally, all measures reviewed showed greater negative predictive power rates; thus, a two-stage sequential process for malingering detection is discussed.

This article explores how evaluating trait-like resistance with objective personality-assessment instruments can assist therapists in better anticipating, understanding, and responding to their clients' signs of therapeutic resistance. First, it reviews the data regarding gender-influenced attitudes toward psychological treatment, and then presents and discusses specific Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) validity, clinical, and content scales that measure elements of treatment resistance. The article also analyzes clinical and normative data on the Butcher Treatment Planning Inventory, a measure that was created specifically for treatment-planning purposes. Finally, it presents a case example to illustrate specific methods of informing psychotherapy with objective test data.

This chapter explores the meaning of the film Groundhog Day relative to social-psychological elements of boredom. The chapter presents the popular film Groundhog Day featuring actor Bill Murray as a metaphor for American soldiers’ experiences in Iraq. American soldiers and others in Iraq referred to their experience as akin to the film. Groundhog Day is a spatio-temporal displacement film, a comedic love story featuring personal redemption in order for the main character to successfully transform. Groundhog Day—the day—has spiritual and nature roots and represents the transition to springtime. All religions find utility in the film’s leitmotif, and Bill Murray represents a character regularly cast in transitional roles. The chapter highlights direct references to the film from those with experience in Iraq and presents some interpretations of the film itself that are illustrative of the American experience in Iraq. The chapter concludes with some future directions for research by social psychologists and applications for practitioners interested in soldiering, film, and boredom.

This chapter reviews the ways in which children's sometimes limited imaginative abilities hampers their performance as witnesses in court. Children's resistance to unpleasant hypotheticals undermines their apparent understanding of the truth and lies. Their difficulty with recognizing referential ambiguity leads them to sound incoherent or incomprehensible. Better understanding of children's developmental limitations, improved questioning, and objections to developmentally insensitive questions could improve children's performance.

Child maltreatment is a significant global public health problem that impacts children’s health and mental health while young but also can follow them into adulthood, potentially carrying forward patterns of abusive parenting. To effectively manage and eliminate child maltreatment, a uniform definition of abuse and neglect must be developed for proper monitoring of prevalence. Reporting laws and protection of children should be followed with care, and evidence-based prevention strategies and interventions should be disseminated widely. At present, research on treatment of abuse and neglect has produced several models that are scientifically supported and rated as evidence based. Sufficient research has been conducted for the field to practice within the bounds of science. However, further research is needed on implementation of evidence-based treatments.

Correctional environments are unique as settings in which people are confined involuntarily, possibly for very long periods of time, and not for their own welfare. As such they can be very difficult places to endure. Moreover, inmates and staff are exposed to multiple environmental stressors whose effects may be magnified by the time of exposure and the difficulty in avoiding them. Inmates commonly need to cope with lack of privacy, high levels of crowding, isolation from needed human contact, constant high levels of noise, poor lighting conditions (too little in the daytime and too much at night), and little access to nature or nature views. New models of correctional design, with increased direct contact between inmates and staff, and greater control over environmental conditions, have had success in reducing violent behavior in recent decades. A model of environmental determinants of violence is presented that attempts to explain this success.

Cybercrime is a significant challenge to society, but it can be particularly harmful to the individuals who become victims. This chapter engages in a comprehensive and topical analysis of the cybercrimes that target individuals. It also examines the motivation of criminals that perpetrate such attacks and the key human factors and psychological aspects that help to make cybercriminals successful. Key areas assessed include social engineering (e.g., phishing, romance scams, catfishing), online harassment (e.g., cyberbullying, trolling, revenge porn, hate crimes), identity-related crimes (e.g., identity theft, doxing), hacking (e.g., malware, cryptojacking, account hacking), and denial-of-service crimes. As a part of its contribution, the chapter introduces a summary taxonomy of cybercrimes against individuals and a case for why they will continue to occur if concerted interdisciplinary efforts are not pursued.

Professionals often utilize some form of structured approach (i.e., decision support tool or risk assessment instrument) when evaluating the risk of future violence and associated management needs. This chapter presents an overview of decision support tools that are used to assist professionals when conducting a violence risk assessment and that have received considerable empirical evaluation and professional uptake. The relative strengths and weaknesses of the two main approaches to evaluations of risk (actuarial and structured professional judgment) are discussed, including a review of empirical findings regarding their predictive validity. Following a summary of commonalities among the tools, this chapter provides a brief description of 10 decision support tools focusing on their applicability and purpose, content and characteristics, and available empirical research. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of several critical considerations regarding the appropriate use and selection of tools.

Elder abuse and neglect are serious problems affecting tens of thousands of older adults each year. In this chapter, we discuss elder abuse in its various forms (including emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, financial maltreatment, and neglect) and provide recommendations for screening and prevention relevant to health-care providers working with geriatric populations. We further highlight clinical and contextual issues pertinent to screening for elder abuse and to its prevention, followed by a review of information regarding emergency management and care in cases of suspected or confirmed elder abuse. We conclude with a discussion about mandated reporting laws and community-based intervention strategies. We hope that this chapter will improve providers’ knowledge of the prevalence and consequences of elder abuse and strengthen the willingness to screen for and intervene in situations where an older adult may be the victim of elder abuse or neglect.

Psychologists’ environmental work fosters protection of the natural world (e.g., forests, animals, ecosystems) and opposes environmental degradation. Utilizing research on seven activist environmental collaboratives that addressed long-standing environmental and health challenges, this chapter examines moral exclusion in environmental degradation that has disproportionately burdened low-income communities of color for many decades. Research on these projects identifies strategies, activities, and successes of environmental justice collaborations can effect a shift from moral exclusion to moral inclusion. A study of their work, which includes education, research, and outreach, offers a nuanced and activity-based understanding of processes that can foster moral inclusion.

Although concerns about violence risk emerge regularly in routine clinical practice, many clinicians feel underprepared to assess and manage violence risk. One problem is that the rich knowledge base underlying violence risk assessment has largely remained in the specialties of forensic psychology and psychiatry, where it has been less familiar to clinicians in general practice. In this chapter we review the legal and ethical parameters that guide clinician appraisals of violence risk, and then we summarize the foundational knowledge and techniques—from both the forensic psychology approach and the emerging field of threat assessment. By integrating basic knowledge and practices from these specialized disciplines, clinicians can more comfortably incorporate violence risk assessment and management into their routine care for patients, better infuse risk assessment into the start of treatment, monitor risk over the course of treatment, and respond appropriately to any threats of violence that emerge.

Sleep medicine has extended into two areas with legal implications: 1) public policy regarding work-related accidents caused by excessive sleepiness and 2) harm done during partial arousals from sleep. In the first, excessive daytime sleepiness, harm is caused by the defendant falling asleep during a waking activity. In the second, partial arousals from sleep, such as sleepwalking, harm occurs when the accused behaves as if awake while still partially sleeping. Accidents due to excessive daytime sleepiness are often the result of insufficient time spent sleeping. This has led several countries to regulate allowable working hours. Aggressive and sexual assaults during sleepwalking have resulted in improved diagnostic specificity. A sleep expert’s role as witness in these new areas includes validation of the diagnosis and testimony pertinent to responsibility for a sleep-related, unmotivated, nonconscious act. This role is controversial based on the ability of the expert to judge an accused’s state of mind during an unwitnessed event remote in time and the explanatory model they employ.

Forensic psychology is a term used to describe a broad range of research topics and applications that address human behavior in the legal system. Personality and social psychologists are among those who have contributed to our understanding of individual differences in performance (e.g., among liars and lie detectors, crime suspects, witnesses, and jurors) and situational influences (e.g., effects of training on lie detection, the false evidence ploy on false confessions, police feedback on eyewitnesses, and inadmissible testimony on jurors) as well as the role that psychologists have played within the legal system. This chapter discusses how individual difference and situational variables contribute to the reliability of different types of evidence (e.g., confessions, eyewitnesses, alibis) introduced in court as well as how jurors make decisions about the evidence presented at trial.

This chapter examines the interpersonal influence of friendships in the amplification of problem behavior during adolescent development. Two dynamic influence processes are described: deviancy training and coercive joining. The actor–partner interdependence model (APIM) framework is applied to videotaped observations of adolescent friendships, looking at selection and influence processes underlying the amplification of problem behavior through deviancy training and coercive joining dynamics. As such, it is revealed that antisocial youths tend to bring in antisocial friends, a finding consistent with results from several other studies. Together, selection and influence processes contribute to the degree of deviancy training and coercive joining. The amount of observed deviancy training predicts future antisocial behavior, whereas coercive joining uniquely predicts escalations to more serious forms of violence. Implications of these findings are discussed for developmental and intervention science, with the explicit goals of preventing and reducing problem behaviors in childhood and adolescence.

This essay addresses the relevance of genetic data, including gene-by-environment interactions, to criminal responsibility and sentencing. After describing the criminal law’s implicit psychology and criteria for responsibility, it considers the present and future contributions genetics may make. It suggests that, at present, genetics should not play a large role in the adjudication of individual cases unless it translates directly into the law’s folk psychological criteria for responsibility, which it seldom does. Future discoveries may increase the usefulness of genetics to rational adjudication, however. The role of genetics at sentencing may be somewhat more promising, especially concerning the prediction of future behavior.

While cybercrime can often be an individual activity pursued by lone hackers, it has increasingly grown into a group activity, with networks across the world. This chapter critically examines the group element of cybercrime from several perspectives. It identifies the platforms that online groups—cybercriminal and otherwise—use to interact, and considers groups as both perpetrators and victims of cybercrime. A key novelty is the discovery of new types of online groups whose collective actions border on criminality. The chapter also analyzes how online cybercrime groups form, organize, and operate. It explores issues such as trust, motives, and means, and draws on several poignant examples, from Anonymous to LulzSec, to illustrate the arguments.