Law and Mental Health: Identifying and Avoiding “Junk Science” in Forensic Psychological Assessments

Law and Mental Health: Identifying and Avoiding “Junk Science” in Forensic Psychological Assessments - Tess Neal, Ph.D.

Tess M.S. Neal, PhD is an associate professor of psychology and serves as a Dean’s Professor at Iowa State University. Before moving to Iowa in Fall 2023, she was tenured at Arizona State University, where she was the founding director of the Future of Forensic Science Initiative. She is a scientist; a licensed clinical psychologist trained to assess, diagnose, and treat mental and behavioral disorders; and a forensic psychologist trained to bring psychology into legal contexts. She studies the nature and limits of expertise. Her basic work focuses on understanding and improving human judgment processes – especially among trained experts, and her more applied work focuses on improving forensic and legal experts’ judgments in particular. Her work has been funded by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, and she has published more than four dozen scientific papers. As of January 1, 2024, she will be the incoming Editor-in-Chief of the journal Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. She is a fellow of both the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association and recently completed a Fulbright Scholarship in Australia.

Learning Objectives:

1. Describe the criteria the law uses to identify "junk science" by expert witnesses.
2. Estimate the average scientific validity of assessment tools used by psychologists as evidence in court and explain how calibrated courts are to the scientific validity of these tools.
3. Identify free high-quality resources for improving forensic psychological assessment practice.

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