Law and Mental Health: Improving the Rigor of Forensic Psychological Assessment Practices

Law and Mental Health: Improving the Rigor of Forensic Psychological Assessment Practices -Tess Neal, Ph.D.

Tess Neal is an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University, a founding faculty member of ASU's Law and Behavioral Science Initiative, and principal investigator of the Clinical and Legal Judgment Lab. She is a scientist, a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist, and a parent of two young children. 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 experts’ judgments in particular. Her work has been funded by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, and she has been awarded numerous research and teaching awards. She serves as editor for the Journal of Personality Assessment and Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, and as an Open Science Advisor for Clinical Psychological Science. She was selected as a Fulbright Scholar to work in Australia for the Spring of 2022 on a project about how the different evidence laws of the U.S. and Australia lead to similar and different patterns of judicial decision making about forensic psychological assessment evidence, with the potential to inform revisions to laws governing the admissibility of expert evidence in both countries.

Learning Objectives:
1. Specify 8 best practices to evaluate the rigor and value of a forensic psychological assessment.
2. Differentiate the foundational validity of an assessment from applied validity of an assessment.
3. Describe how strategies borrowed from open science, forensic science, and judgment & decision making could
be used to improve the rigor of and reduce bias in forensic psychological assessments.

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