Introduction to Legal & Forensic Psychology (FSWP4023F)
Summary
Full Summary of Lectures/articles Intro to Legal and Forensic Psychology
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Introduction to Legal & Forensic Psychology (FSWP4023F)
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Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam (EUR)
A comprehensive final overview (SUMMARY articles/lecture notes) of the course Introduction to Forensic & Legal Psychology as part of the EUR MSc Legal & Forensic Psychology.
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Introduction to Legal & Forensic Psychology (FSWP4023F)
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– Introduction to FLP Full Summary –
1: Verbal credibility
Main lecture takeaways
→ Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA): assumes that memory of an actual experience differs in
verbal quality and content from statements that were invented.
- Around 70% accuracy rating
- This can only be used for deception and is not accurate for false memories.
→ Reality Monitoring approach (RM): Cues: Clarity/vividness, Sensory information, Spatial information,
Time information, Reconstructability, Emotions/feelings, Realism, Cognitive operations
- Applicable to any case or suspect
- Around 70% accuracy rating
→ Verifiability approach: liars often provide details that are harder to verify, whereas truth tellers can
provide details that are verifiable
→ The use-the-best heuristic: Keeping it simple, and only looking for 1 type of deception que. “Use the
best and forget the rest”. They look at detailedness and reach an accuracy significantly higher than
chance (around 70%).
→ Consistency is not a strong predictor. Problem with this is that normal people are often slightly
inconsistent even when they are truthful, often due to delay, forgetfulness, or nervousness.
→ Malingering
- Faking good: Complaint underreporting
- Faking bad: Complaint overreporting
→ Supernormality Scale-Revised: (SC-R) → Underreporting of “normal” symptoms may indicate faking
good, or supernormality. The lower the score, the higher the chance of supernormality.
Supernormality Article: Cima 2008 - Development of the Supernormality Scale- Revised and
Its Relationship with Psychopathy
Aim: address psychometric properties of the supernormality scale revised + see if its related to
psychopathy
Supernormality scale revised (SS-R) → a self report measurement which measure supernormality, the
tendency to systematically deny presence of common symptoms (eg: intrusive thoughts)
Supernormality → gross exaggeration of healthy features
- Not just of psychiatric symptoms but also common symptoms
- Differs from social desirability as it doesn't depend on social context
Malingering → faking ‘bad’, exaggeration psychiatric symptoms (eg: adult with lengthy history of
antisocial behaviour who’s facing a long prison sentence may be motivated to feign insanity in an
attempt to avoid a long and harsh incarceration
Faking good → Exaggeration of positive features (eg: when this person is already serving his time in a
mental institution; he then might be motivated by different factors. Exhibiting signs of mental illness
may prolong his stay in a mental hospital. Thus, in this context, deception may manifest itself in
minimising psychopathology.)
Relationship psychopathy & supernormality → according to DSM, there is relationship, nonetheless
results are often mixed
Study 1: properties of the SS-R
,Participants
- Forensic patients (psychiatric ⁄ criminal)
- Psychiatric patients (psychiatric ⁄ noncriminal)
- Students (nonpsychiatric ⁄ noncriminal)
- Instructed students (nonpsychiatric ⁄noncriminal)
SSR material: 56 items, 7 domains
- Social desirability
- Mood disorders
- Obsessive compulsive symptoms
- Psychotic symptoms
- Dissociative symptoms
- Aggression
- Anxiety symptoms
→ Items selected in such a way that normal people experience them on a regular basis, hence
normal people would provide positive answers on nearly all items.
→ low scores on the SS- R indicate supernormal behavior
- Paranoia Scale (PS) – self-report test containing 20 items fulfilling at least one aspect of paranoia (e.g.
belief that people are against you). It is expected that high levels of paranoia are expected to correlate
with low levels of supernormality
Results
- Reliability: test-retest reliability = good
- Internal consistency = excellent (cronbach = 0.88)
- Validity = scores significantly differed between groups (p<0.01)
- Forensic patients scored similar to instructed controls, had significantly lower scores
than those of the psychiatric patients & honestly responding controls (high
supernormality)
- Psychiatric patients scored similar to honest controls, but significantly higher than the
instructed controls (low supernormality)
- Honestly responding controls scored significantly higher than the instructed controls
- Construct validity (correlations significant, subnormality was related to paranoia)
- Supernormality was found to be moderately, but significantly related to paranoia
- Diagnostic accuracy (sensitivity = 80%; fakers identified correctly, non fakers were classified
correctly (specificity), PPP=0.88, NPP=0.86
Study 2: relationship psychopathy (PPI) & supernormality (SS-R)
- Psychopathy is characterised by superficial charm and manipulative behaviour: seems plausible
that it would be related to supernormality
Participants N = 152
- Control
- Forensic patients
Instruments:
- SS-R
- PPI
- 8 scales
- Machiavellian Egocentricity→ assesses narcissistic and ruthless attitudes in
interpersonal functioning.
- Social Potency scale → perceived ability to influence and manipulate others.
- Coldheartedness→ propensity toward callousness, guiltlessness, and lack of
sentimentality
- Carefree Non Planfulness → assesses an attitude of indifference in planning
actions
- Fearlessness → level of absence of anticipatory anxiety concerning harm and a
willingness to participate in risky activities.
- Alienation or Blame Externalization → tendency to blame others for one’s
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, problems and to rationalise one’s misbehaviour
- Impulsive Nonconformity → reckless lack of concern regarding social norms
- Stress Immunity → absence of marked reactions to anxiety- provoking events.
- 3 validity scales
- Deviant Responding (DR) Scale → malingering
- Unlikely Virtues (UV) → socially desirable impression management
- Variable Response Inconsistency → inconsistencies in answers, such as
careless responding
Results
- Good psychometric properties of SS-R, again demonstrated
- Relationship between SS-R and PPI - supernormality (as indicated by lower SS-R total scores)
was related to low levels of psychopathic traits
- Opposite result of what was expected
Conclusion
→ psychometric properties of SS-R are much better than the original SS
→ psychopathy NOT related to faking good (supernormality)
→ limitations included: study 2 sample small and little discrepancy between SS-R scores of different
groups
RM Article: Masip 2005 - The detection of deception with the reality monitoring approach: a
review of the empirical evidence
Aim: review studies to yield general conclusions concerning discriminative power of this approach
Reality monitoring approach → a verbal approach to detection deception, trying to identity
characteristics that differ between internal & external memories.Used in psychology to distinguish
between memories of events that were actually experienced (truthful) and memories of events that
were internally generated (deceptive)
- Truth → refers to recollection of something actually done/witnesses
- Lie → internally generated memory (events that didn’t occur/imaginative)
Theory behind RM
- Based on research on memory
- Johnson & Raye proposed origin of someone’ memories may be known based on characteristics
of those memories
- External origin – based on perceptual processes (memories of experienced events)
- Internal origin – based on reasoning, imagination and thought processes
- → Reality monitoring – the strategies used by individuals to differentiate one
- They argued 4 types of information which may present in someone’s memories:
- Contextual information (space/time)
- Sensory information (shapes/colours)
- Semantic information
- Cognitive operations
- External memories will contain more contextual, sensory and semantic details
- Internally memories (imagined vents) will contain less of these details, more cognitive processes
- → Thus to discriminate between truthful and deceptive statements, presence of sensory,
semantic, contextual and monitoring of cognitive processes is useful
Empirical research
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, - Alonso-Quecuty (1992) - The joint effect of delay and elaboration (preparation time) increased
the number of contextual details more than any of these factors alone, and increased the
sensory details especially in the truthful statements
- Whereas Alonso-Quecuty's studies involved participants falsifying reports of witnessed events,
Sporer and Kupper (1995) studies compared truthful autobiographical events with freely
invented events of the same category. Found that Truthful (Self-Experienced) Events were rated
higher in realism and time information and contained fewer sensory experiences. Some
differences in clarity, vividness, and spatial information were observed, but only in the delayed
condition (after 1 week).
- Also found that the RM criteria were able to discriminate between truthful and
deceptive accounts, with some criteria being more effective in the delayed condition.
- Santtilla et al (1999) → usefulness of RM procedure to distinguish truth/deception
- RM compareto reality monitoring approach wa more useful in detecting deception
- Vrij (2001) evidence of discriminative power of RM procedure. Showed evidence of the
discriminative power of the RM procedure: 60% of the participants reached the highest RM
score possible when telling the truth, and only 12% reached this maximum score when lying
This was also influenced by personality factors and gender
Moderator variables of RM criteria
(1) Mode of presentation → stronger differences when events were experienced personally than
witnesses on video/audio
(2) Preparation and delay → Differences in how the delay was manipulated across these studies
likely contribute to the contradictory findings
(3) Repeated statements→ repeating the account can affect information and explain
contradictions among studies
(4) Age of witness → as verbal skills increase with age, the presence of some criteria may also
increase, irrespective of truth status. In line with their predictions, research has shown that the
witness’s age has an impact on the presence of certain content criteria
(5) Individual differences → personality characteristics such as self consciousness/acting ability
and self monitoring and gender can influence
Methodological considerations RM
(1) Experimental Paradigm: Variations in the type of participants (victims, witnesses, suspects) and
the nature of events being investigated (innocuous, criminal, emotionally charged) can influence
the presence and discriminative power of RM criteria. Future research should explore these
differences further.
(2) Sample Size: Discrepancies in sample sizes across studies impact result reliability, especially in
interactions with truth status and individual criterion effect sizes.
(3) Operationalizations of RM Criteria: Different researchers have used varying RM criteria and
definitions, and there's a need to establish a standardised set of criteria with precise operational
definitions, particularly for terms like 'internal states' and 'cognitive operations.' This
standardisation could help resolve contradictory findings.
(4) Scoring of Criteria: Scoring methods for RM criteria differ among research groups, with some
using frequency counts and others using rating scales. Variations in account length may
confound some effects reported in studies
Discriminative power of RM (compared to other approaches)
- The SVA/CBCA approach has poor theoretical foundations. It is based on the Undeutsch
hypothesis which states that the descriptions of events that a witness has experienced him- or
herself will differ in content, quality and expression from the descriptions of events which are a
product of the imagination. It does not specify the why and when (bottom-up theory).
- The RM approach does have a solid, supported theoretical foundation. Within the eyewitness
domain, the RM approach has been successfully employed to explain misinformation and
suggestibility effects. Applying this to detection deception is harder: RM predictions concerning
the discrimination between truthful statements and lies have not always been supported by the
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