Author Archives: Marvin W. Acklin, Ph.D.

My name is Marvin Acklin. I am a board-certified clinical and forensic psychologist practicing in Honolulu. I am very interested in psychology interfacing with the legal system. As I am a forensic generalist, I am involved daily in a wide range of cases. These include criminal (insanity and fitness to stand trial) and civil law (personal injury), child custody, personnel selection/fitness for duty, legal capacity assessments, and forensic risk assessment. We do violence risk assessments for the courts and private attorneys. I am a trained child forensic interviewer in cases of suspected child sexual abuse. I have diverse interests in medicine, law, history, theology, and clinical, assessment, social, and forensic psychology.
Please visit my website: http://dracklin.com

My practice partner, Dr. Melissa Villalon, and I perform psychosexual risk assessments in both the private sector and for the Hawaii Sex Offender Treatment Program.
Please visit our website: http://www.pacificforensicassociates.com/

New variety of shark sighted in Hawaii waters

Readers may remem­ber my post on “Swimming with Sharks” a few months back–a set of guide­lines and admon­ish­ments to clin­i­cians work­ing in and around the Hawaii Family Court. Well, a new vari­ety of shark has recently been sighted in Hawaii waters. These are main­land foren­sic psy­chol­o­gists who have started com­ing to Hawaii to sell their …

February 24, 2013 – 7:37 pm | By Marvin W. Acklin, Ph.D. | Posted in Assessment, Expert witness, Family law | Comments (0)

Disclosure, denial, delay, recantation, and confirmation in CSA

Despite sev­eral years of high qual­ity research in CSA, courts con­tinue to hear that pat­terns of dis­clo­sure, denial, delay, and recan­ta­tion are (or are not) dis­pos­i­tive of CSA. In their review of these issues in a recent spe­cial issue of Memory, London, Ceci, Wright, and Ceci (2008) draw the fol­low­ing con­clu­sions: “We have argued that, in …

April 16, 2012 – 5:47 pm | By Marvin W. Acklin, Ph.D. | Posted in Child Abuse, Expert witness, Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Psychological Experts in CSA Trials

Back in September 2011, I mused about how help­ful psy­cho­log­i­cal experts are in CSA tri­als. Testimony will inevitably have to address devel­op­ments in sev­eral areas, includ­ing pat­terns of dis­clo­sure, mem­ory, sug­gestibil­ity, qual­ity of foren­sic inter­views, and error rates of CSA decision-making, highly tech­ni­cal stuff. The work of Bruck and Ceci has remained author­i­ta­tive for almost …

April 15, 2012 – 6:14 pm | By Marvin W. Acklin, Ph.D. | Posted in Child Abuse, Expert witness | Comments (0)

The new Specialty Guidelines for Forensic Psychology (APA, 2011)

The new SGFP have been final­ized by APLS (Div. 41 of APA). The Guidelines are avail­able at the fol­low­ing link http://goo.gl/usU0 The SGFP pro­vide guid­ance and stan­dards of prac­tice for foren­sic psy­chol­o­gists. They are worth care­ful study for the prac­ti­tioner wish­ing to do sound and eth­i­cal, i.e., high qual­ity, foren­sic work. The SGFP define the scope of …

April 15, 2012 – 12:08 pm | By Marvin W. Acklin, Ph.D. | Posted in Expert witness, Professional Psychology | Comments (0)

Forensic Clinician’s Toolbox I — CST Instruments published in Journal of Personality Assessment

My recent review in JPA got a nice boost from Ken Pope and Karen Franklin. Many thanks. A PDF copy of the arti­cle is avail­able online.

April 14, 2012 – 10:14 pm | By Marvin W. Acklin, Ph.D. | Posted in Assessment, Professional Psychology | Comments (0)

Juror Psychology–Can juries ignore inadmissible evidence or pretrial publicity?

Answer: prob­a­bly not. Superb chap­ter by Lieberman, Arndt, & Vess: “Inadmissible evi­dence and pre­trial pub­lic­ity: The effects (and inef­fec­tive­ness) of admo­ni­tions to dis­re­gard.” You “can­not unring the bell” as one judge put it. The last 30 years of social cog­ni­tive psy­chol­ogy, start­ing with the work of Tversky and Kahneman, up to the most recent work …

January 21, 2012 – 9:32 pm | By Marvin W. Acklin, Ph.D. | Posted in Social psychology | Comments (0)

Psychopathic sexuality– a component of psychopathy?

There has been a run­ning debate over the past 18 years as to whether psy­choapthy is a “taxon”;  “an entity, type, syn­drome, dis­ease, or more gen­er­ally, a nonar­bi­trary class.” The con­cept goes back to Paul Meehl (1982; 1995) who laid out the impor­tance of the con­cept for clas­si­fy­ing psychopathology. Harris, Rice and Quinsey (1994) argued that psy­chopa­thy is a taxon, …

January 21, 2012 – 9:28 pm | By Marvin W. Acklin, Ph.D. | Posted in Criminal law, Psychopathy | Comments (0)

New Developments in Psychopathy

Jennifer Skeem and her col­leagues have chal­lenged the sta­tus quo in recent con­tro­verises con­cern­ing the def­i­n­i­tion and mea­sure­ment of psy­chopa­thy. Is psy­chopa­thy a uni­tary entity (a global syn­drome with a dis­crete under­ly­ing cause) or rather is it a con­fig­u­ra­tion of sev­eral dis­tin­guish­able but inter­sect­ing trait dimensions? Is psy­chopa­thy syn­ony­mous with crim­i­nal behav­ior? Is there a positive-adjustment type of …

January 21, 2012 – 8:02 pm | By Marvin W. Acklin, Ph.D. | Posted in Assessment, Behavior, Psychopathy | Comments (0)

Dummy’s Guide to Forensic Risk Assessment

A risk assess­ment iden­ti­fies risk fac­tors, antic­i­pated level of risk, and nec­es­sary risk reduc­tion and man­age­ment strate­gies. Conclusion lan­guage uti­lizes spec­i­fi­ca­tion of risk fac­tors and risk reduc­tion strate­gies that may mit­i­gate iden­ti­fied risk fac­tors. Risk assess­ments should include both risk like­li­hood and risk reduc­tion. Risk assess­ment assumes prob­a­bil­ity of recur­rence in the absence of risk …

September 17, 2011 – 3:47 pm | By Marvin W. Acklin, Ph.D. | Posted in Assessment | Comments (0)

Dummy’s Guide to Risk Reduction for Sex Offenders

For human beings, there are two pri­mary classes of con­straints against doing wrong or bad: intrin­sic and extrin­sic. Intrinsic con­straints focus on the offender’s inter­nal­ized norms, con­science, empa­thy capac­ity, impulse con­trol, and abil­ity to fore­see and be con­strained by antic­i­pated con­se­quences of the offense behav­ior. Intrinsic con­straints against offend­ing behav­ior may be weak­ened through the …

September 17, 2011 – 3:44 pm | By Marvin W. Acklin, Ph.D. | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)