Introduction to Special Section: Personality Assessment and the Law

Although personality assessment psychologists are consulted for a variety of reasons, their involvement in forensic matters and the court system is quite frequent. For instance, psychologists are asked to assign a comprehensive diagnosis, determine whether a person is malingering, determine an individual's risk for violence, or assess a person's fitness for a particular type of work (e.g., law enforcement, medicine). Furthermore, assessment psychologists are often faced with questions about how useful their instruments are. Prosecuting and defense attorneys, as well as treatment providers and law enforcement officials, all have a vested interest in knowing whether the results of these assessments actually tell them something meaningful about the person and his or her functioning. When the tests offer data to make useful decisions about people, assessment psychologists are appreciated and the instruments are deemed useful for the question at hand. However, when the tests cannot offer data that lead to accurate or useful conclusions about a person, the measure can fall by the wayside, and the assessment psychologist's role might be somewhat diminished.

Because of the importance of personality assessment in forensic and legal contexts, it was important to me that the Journal of Personality Assessment be an outlet in which papers on this topic could be published. To that end, not only did I request papers on this topic on assuming editorship (Huprich, 2014), but I also invited Dr. John Edens to take the lead on editing and assembling a special section on this topic for the journal. Edens and Dr. David DeMatteo put out a call for papers on the broad topic of personality assessment and the law. They received a number of inquiries, and what follows is the product of their efforts. I am most appreciative of the work these two did, as well as the contributions of these authors.

The five articles that make up this special section cover a wide range of topics. The first article by Rulseh, Edens, and Cox (this issue) is a study of how triarchic personality traits of psychopathy affect mock jurors' perceptions of the personality of an alleged defendant. Among other things, this article demonstrates how the perception of others has an effect on how people are treated—in this case, how sentencing recommendations are made, even though in some settings one of the triarchic traits (boldness) is often seen as adaptive.

The next article by Brown, Iannelli, and Marganoff (this issue) explores how the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; Morey, 2007) has been used in fitness-for-duty evaluations for physicians referred by a multidisciplinary team of health care professionals. Despite the absence of high levels of psychopathology in this sample, notable differences across scales were detected between those judged to be fit and unfit, thus demonstrating the usefulness of having relevant norms by which to compare findings.

Boccaccini, Harris, Schrantz, and Varela (this issue) then provide another study of the PAI, this time considering how the instrument is used to evaluate those convicted as sexually violent predators. The study highlights how one state sets guidelines for the evaluation of sex offenders and the challenges of using the PAI in such a context.

Gardner and Boccaccini (this issue) offer a second study on the PAI and sex offenders, this time about PAI response style and its relationship to the convergent validity of the PAI Antisocial Features scale with the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (Hare, 2003), again in a large sample of sexual offenders.

The final article by Balsis, Busch, Wilfong, Newman, and Edens (this issue) offers a careful consideration of the PCL–R cut scores for the determination of psychopathy. Using item-response theory analyses, Balsis et al. demonstrate that a cut score of 30 does not always imply the same level or type of dysfunction. They recommend that the use of item parameters would allow clinicians to more precisely evaluate psychopathy, which could have significant legal implications.

Quite fortuitously, there were a number of other papers that were submitted to JPA that were forensically oriented, so I was most pleased to be able to include these as part of this issue. For those interested in forensic assessment, I suspect this issue will be most enjoyable to read.

As I stated earlier, I am hopeful that psychologists and other mental health professionals who work in the forensic and legal areas will consider JPA as a very receptive outlet for their papers. I am especially grateful to Dr. Edens and Dr. DeMatteo for their efforts. It is clear that personality assessment is highly needed and regarded in forensic and legal contexts, and these articles offer some insight into how assessment psychologists use these instruments and engage in the assessment process in their work.