This is a complete summary of the literature of the course 'Introduction to Forensic and Legal Psychology' of the master 'Forensic and Legal Psychology'. It was made in the academic year , so if the literature changes overtime it might contain some different articles. However, it has 93 pages so it...
Development of the Supernormality Scale-Revised and its Relationship with Psychopathy
Cima (2008)
Abstract
- Supernormality – the tendency to systematically deny the presence of common
symptoms (faking good, underreporting, etc.)
- This study adresses the psychometric and diagnostic qualities of the Supernormality
Scale-Revised (SS-R) (self-report)
- Results showed that the SS-R is a reliable and valid instrument. However,
supernormality was not related to psychopathy as measured by the PPI
The presence of different types of deceptive behaviour (e.g. faking good/bad) may depend
on the goals someone want to achieve (e.g. avoiding incarceration).
- Research shows that especially psychopathic defendants – as measured with
Psychopathic Personality Invenroty (PPI) – demonstrated significantly higher
malingering scores pretrial, while they did not show signs of either form of deception
after being convicted > these results suggest that the occurrence of different forms of
deception depends on both legal context and personality traits
- In supernormality, even very common symptoms that everyday people experience
are denied. It is not the same as social desirability.
- According to the DSM-IV-TR (1), malingering is often present in persons with an
antisocial personality disorder. As psychopaths are often diagnosed with an
antisocial personality disorder , one would expect a relationship between
psychopathy and malingering as well > however, results are mixed
Expectation: high psychopathic traits will be related to high supernormality
Study 1
Aim: developing and testing a revised self-report scale measuring supernormality (SS-R),
which can provide more information on whether patients deny their psychopathology.
Instruments
- Supernormality Scale-Revised (SS-R) – original SS-R consisted of 56 items based on 7
domains:
1. Social desirability
2. Mood disorders
3. Obsessive compulsice symptoms
4. Psychotic symptoms
5. Dissociative symptoms
6. Agression
, 7. Anxiety symptoms
Items are selected in a way that ‘‘normal’’ people experience them on a
regular basis in their own life
- 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 stability (8-week interval) of the SS-R was found to be fairly
good, internal consistency was excellent
- Validity SS-R:
Forensic patients had significantly lower scores than those of the psychiatric
patients and the honestly responding control group
Forensic patients did not significantly differ from instructed controls
Psychiatric patients scored significantly higher than the instructed controls
whereas they did not differ significantly from the honestly responding controls
Honestly responding controls scored significantly higher than the instructed
controls
- Validity PS:
Mean PS scores of the forensic patients did not differ from those of the
psychiatric patients whereas they had significantly higher scores than the
honestly responding controls
Supernormality was found to be moderately, but significantly related to paranoia
Study 2
While one would expect psychopaths to be succesful malingeres (because of their
manipulative behaviour), research on this relationship is sparse. A problem with this
association is that one expects psychopaths to exaggerate psychiatric symptoms, but
considering context one may also expect psychopaths to exaggerate normal symptoms and
deny psychopathology.
This study aims to investigate the relationship between faking good and psychopathy
Participants
- 152 participants (forensic patients)
- Control group 118 participants
Results
- Reliability SS-R: internal consistency of the SS-R in the mixed sample of 152
participants was fairly good
- Validity SS-R: forensic patients demonstrated significantly lower SS-R scores than the
control participants
, - Relationship between SS-R and PPI – supernormality (as indicated by lower SS-R total
scores) was related to low levels of psychopathic traits the relationship between
faking good and psychopathy was exactly in the opposite direction than expected
Discussion
- The results show that the psychometric qualities of the SS-R are much better than
those of the original SS:
Good test-retest stability and excellent internal consistency
Good predictive validity
Good convergent validity (supernormality relates negatively with paranoia)
Impressive diagnostic accuracy
- Psychopathy was not related to faking good
- Limitations:
1. Patient sample in study 2 was small
2. Little discrepancy between mean SSR scores of the different groups, both in study
1 and 2
Possible explanation: PPI does not really measure psychopathic traits, but
antisocial behavior. But other factors could also influence the relationship
between supernormality and psychopathy (e.g. intellicence)
- Future research: As research on psychopathy and pathological lying has
demonstrated to be related to specific brain areas (22–24), one would expect that
specifically the frontal lobe is involved in choosing a strategy of faking good or bad.
Given that the more impulsive offenders have lower frontal lobe brain activity (24), it
seems likely that certain personality characteristics will be negatively related to
faking behavior using functional neuroimaging
- Conclusions: findings showed reasonably good evidence for the reliability and validity
of the SS-R. The relationship between supernormality and psychopathy, as well as
other psychiatric diagnoses, and certain brain areas need further investigation
, The detection of deception with the reality monitoring approach: a review of the empirical
evidence Masip (2007)
Abstract
- Reality monitoring (RM) – a verbal approach to deception detection that tries to
identify the characteristics that differentiate between internal and external
memories
- This paper attempted to to review all available studies in order to yield some general
conclusions concerning the discriminative power of this approach
Introduction
There are currently 3 major approached to deception detection:
1. Approach that encompasses several procedures based upon the measurement,
recording and analysis of the psychophysiological activity of the subject being
examined (e.g. polygraph test)
2. Approach that focuses on nonverbal and paraverbal correlates of deception
3. Approach that focuses on the analysis of the verbal content of the witness’s speech’
Criteria-based content analysis (CBCA)
Reality monitoring approach (RM)
Scientific Content Analysis (SCAN)
Verbal non-immediacy
- Main aim of this paper: review the findings of the scientific literature concerning the
RM approach
The RM approach: theoretical foundations and empirical research
Theoretical Foundations: Cognitive Research into the Origin of Memories
- RM approach originated from basic research on memory conducted by Johnson et al.
- Johnson and Raye proposed that the origin of someone’s memories may be known
based on the characteristics of those memories. They differentiated between two
possible origins of memories:
1. External origin – based on perceptual processes (memories of experienced
events)
2. Internal origin – based on reasoning, imagination and thought processes
Reality monitoring – the strategies used by individuals to differentiate one
type of memory from the other
- Johnson and Raye argue that there are four different attributes or kinds of
information which may be present in someone’s memories:
1. Contextual information (space and time)
2. Sensory information (shapes and colours)
3. Semantic information
4. Cognitive operations
External memories would contain more contextual, sensory, and semantic
details whereas internal memories would contain more cognitive processes
- According to the RM approach the ‘‘truth’’ is the recollection of something done or
witnessed, and a lie is an internally generated memory
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