Discuss the issue of defendants faking incompetence on tests for evaluating trial competence.
What will be an ideal response?
Answers may vary.One important issue being studied by researchers is the extent to which defendants can successfully fake incompetence on these tests. Some research suggests that although offenders can simulate incompetence, they often take such simulations to extremes, scoring much more poorly on specialized measures of competence capacities than their truly incompetent counterparts. Therefore, very poor performance should make evaluators suspicious that a defendant might be exaggerating his or her deficiencies. As noted earlier, one specialized tool (the ECST-R) has a built-in measure to help the evaluator determine whether the defendant is exaggerating deficits. Research indicates that the ECST-R is sensitive to the exaggeration of both symptoms of mental illness and intellectual deficits.This issue has gained a great deal of attention because estimates of malingering (faking or grossly exaggerating) mental illness in competence evaluations have been estimated as nearly one in five (18%). Therefore, screening tools have been developed to offer a more scientific method of detecting malingering in patients who are being evaluated for their competence to stand trial. One of these instruments is the Miller Forensic Assessment of Symptoms Test (M-FAST; Miller, 2001). The M-FAST is a brief, 25-item structured interview that can accurately identify individuals who are attempting to feign mental disorders (see Miller, 2004). Empirical evidence thus far supports the use of the M-FAST in detecting malingering (Jackson, Rogers, & Sewell, 2005), but it is a screening instrument and should be used in conjunction with a wider array of assessments to determine whether the defendant is actually malingering.
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a. frequency b. duration c. interval d. individual
People with anti-social personality disorder develop classically conditioned responses involving pain faster than people without psychopathy
Indicate whether this statement is true or false.
A study in which participants are fully informed about the nature of the research and asked to behave "as if" they were in a social setting of interest is known as a(n)
a. acting experiment. b. simulation study. c. simulated realism experiment. d. deceptive study.
In an experiment on gaining false confessions, Kassin and Kiechel (1996) found that in the condition most biased toward yielding a false confession, ______ of participants signed a confession, and of these, about ______ seem to have internalized the belief that they were guilty.
a. 50%; one third b. 50%; two thirds c. 100%; one third d. 100%; two thirds