Hawaii Forensic Psychology

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 …

So what does psy­chol­ogy con­tribute to our under­stand­ing of the human con­di­tion? What does psy­chol­ogy con­tribute to our under­stand­ing of solu­tions to human prob­lems?  Better, how does psy­chol­ogy address your under­stand­ing of the human sit­u­a­tion? Very lit­tle I fear.  I often use the term “human predica­ment,” but this car­ries the crit­i­cal sup­po­si­tion that there is some­thing …

Another piece of our 2010 HPA pre­sen­ta­tion on train­ing and work­force issues in pro­fes­sional psy­chol­ogy con­cerned how well local train­ing pro­grams are prepar­ing grad­u­ates for two career hur­dles: intern­ship selec­tion and the pass­ing the Examination for Professional Practice in Hawaii (EPPP).  I’ll present the num­bers in two sep­a­rate posts and let every­one give them their …

Occasionally, after I have com­pleted an eval­u­a­tion and prof­fered an opin­ion, a party accuses me of “bias.”  I think this means they dis­agree with my opin­ion. Most peo­ple can­not define “bias” very well.  Karen Franklin defines bias very nicely in her Feedblitz foren­sic psy­chol­ogy blog. I quote her below: The term bias refers to a par­tial­ity …

Assessment psy­chol­o­gists need a wide range of tools to address the vari­ety of assess­ment chal­lenges that arise in daily prac­tice.  Not that dif­fer­ent from a set of wrenches and scredrivers designed for every type of bolt and screw. It is per­haps not sur­pris­ing that many psy­chol­o­gists per­sist in using “tra­di­tional” assess­ment mea­sures in foren­sic psy­cho­log­i­cal assess­ment …

This topic is hot, no pun intended, as the diag­nos­tic cat­e­gories for the pro­posed DSM-V are being debated. Researchers are jock­y­ing to have their pref­er­ences enshrined in the man­ual. One group is argu­ing that het­ero­sex­ual male attrac­tion to teenage girls is a para­philia (hebephilia). There is plenty of lab­o­ra­tory research evi­dence that indi­cates that male sex­ual …

I have pre­vi­ously dis­cussed the prob­lems fre­quently encoun­tered with court-involved ther­a­pists (typ­i­cally child ther­a­pists in divorce and child cus­tody cases). Just dis­cov­ered a help­ful addi­tional source of infor­ma­tion in the Journal of Child Custody. Definitely worth a read. Will report on it later. Reference: Greenberg, LR, Gould-Saltman, DJ, & Gottlieb, MC. (2008). ‘Playing in their Sandbox: …

I have been remiss in my blog­ging duties.  Aside from fin­ish­ing a series of arti­cles on self-presentation and psy­cho­log­i­cal assess­ment, which I will report on tomor­row, I have been fin­ish­ing up the mag­is­te­r­ial work on the Korean War by the late David Halberstam (The Coldest Winter).  It is not just about the war, but the …