Pedagosko i psiholosko testiranje i procjenjivanje spadaju među najvažnije doprinose znanosti o ponasanju nasem drustvu i pružaju temeljna i znacajna poboljsanja u odnosu na ranije postupke. Iako se ne može ustvrditi da su svi testovi dovoljno usavrseni niti da su sva testiranja razborita i korisna, postoji velika kolicina informacija koje ukazuju na ucinkovitost kvalitetnih instrumenata u onim situacijama u kojima je njihovo koristenje potkrijepljeno validacijskim podacima. Pravilna upotreba testova može dovesti do boljih odluka o pojedincima i programima nego sto bi to bio slucaj bez njihovog koristenja, a također i ukazati na put za siri i pravedniji pristup obrazovanju i zaposljavanju. Međutim, losa upotreba testova može dovesti do zamjetne stete nanesene ispitanicima i drugim sudionicima u procesu donosenja odluka na temelju testovnih podataka. Cilj Standarda je promoviranje kvalitetne i eticne upotrebe testova te uspostavljanje osnovice za ocjenu kvalitete postupaka testiranja. Svrha objavljivanja Standarda je uspostavljanje kriterija za evaluaciju testova, provedbe testiranja i posljedica upotrebe testova. Iako bi evaluacija prikladnosti testa ili njegove primjene trebala ovisiti prvenstveno o strucnim misljenjima, Standardi pružaju okvir koji osigurava obuhvacanje svih relevantnih pitanja. Bilo bi poželjno da svi autori, sponzori, nakladnici i korisnici profesionalnih testova usvoje Standarde te da poticu druge da ih također prihvate.

Standards for educational and psychological testing

Hardly a family in America has been untouched by mental illness. As many as one third of American adults will suffer a diagnosable mental disorder sometime in their life, and 20 percent have a mental disorder at any given time. Although research on the causes and treatment of mental disorders remains vitally important—and indeed major advances are leading to better lives for increasing numbers of people—much greater effort than ever before needs to be directed to prevention. The Senate Appropriations Committee of the U.S. Congress believed that a strategic approach to the prevention of mental disorders was warranted. The Congress mandated the National Institute of Mental Health to enter into an agreement with the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to prepare an integrated report of current research with policy-oriented and detailed long-term recommendations for a prevention research agenda. The specific tasks of the IOM committee, as negotiated with NIMH and the co-funding agencies, were as follows: • Review the status of current research on the prevention of mental illness and problem behaviors and on the promotion of mental health throughout the life span. This should include an understanding of available research knowledge, research priorities, and research opportunities in the prevention research area. • Review the existing federal presence in the prevention of mental disorders and the promotion of mental health, spanning the continuum from research to policy and services. • Provide recommendations on federal policies and programs of ABSTRACT xi Ab ou t th is P D F fil e: T hi s ne w d ig ita l r ep re se nt at io n of t he o rig in al w or k ha s be en r ec om po se d fro m X M L fil es c re at ed f ro m t he o rig in al p ap er b oo k, n ot f ro m t he or ig in al ty pe se tti ng fi le s. P ag e br ea ks a re tr ue to th e or ig in al ; l in e le ng th s, w or d br ea ks , h ea di ng s ty le s, a nd o th er t y pe se tti ng -s pe ci fic fo rm at tin g, h ow ev er , c an no t b e re ta in ed , a nd s om e ty po gr ap hi c er ro rs m ay h av e be en a cc id en t a lly in se rte d. P le as e us e th e pr in t v er si on o f t hi s pu bl ic at io n as th e au th or ita tiv e ve rs io n fo r a ttr ib ut io n.

Reducing Risks for Mental Disorders: Frontiers for Preventive Intervention Research

Background
This study aims to review the literature regarding the barriers to sampling, recruitment, participation, and retention of members of socioeconomically disadvantaged groups in health research and strategies for increasing the amount of health research conducted with socially disadvantaged groups.

/pdf/reaching-the-hard-to-reach-a-systematic-review-of-strategies-3ure630gx0.pdf

Reaching the hard-to-reach: a systematic review of strategies for improving health and medical research with socially disadvantaged groups

Context Psychopaths belong to a larger group of persons with antisocial personality disorder and are characterized by an inability to have emotional involvement and by the repeated violation of the rights of others. It was hypothesized that this behavior might be the consequence of deficient fear conditioning. Objective To study the cerebral, peripheral, and subjective correlates of fear conditioning in criminal psychopaths and healthy control subjects. Design An aversive differential pavlovian delay conditioning paradigm with slides of neutral faces serving as conditioned and painful pressure as unconditioned stimuli. Setting The Department of Medical Psychology at the University of Tubingen, Tubingen, Germany. Participants Ten male psychopaths as defined by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised and 10 age- and education-matched healthy male controls. The psychopaths were criminal offenders on bail and waiting for their trial or were on parole. The healthy controls were recruited from the community. Main Outcome Measures Brain activation based on functional magnetic resonance imaging, electrodermal responses, emotional valence, arousal, and contingency ratings. Results The healthy controls showed enhanced differential activation in the limbic-prefrontal circuit (amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, insula, and anterior cingulate) during the acquisition of fear and successful verbal and autonomic conditioning. The psychopaths displayed no significant activity in this circuit and failed to show conditioned skin conductance and emotional valence ratings, although contingency and arousal ratings were normal. Conclusion This dissociation of emotional and cognitive processing may be the neural basis of the lack of anticipation of aversive events in criminal psychopaths.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/articlepdf/208744/yoa40213.pdf

Deficient Fear Conditioning in Psychopathy A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

The upshot of these needs for change is both dismaying and exciting, both disturbing in the destruction of long-familiar patterns of dealing with human suffering, and paradoxically hopeful in raising the possibility that significant failures in our health care systems of the past — limited access to medical care and grossly inadequate public sector “non-systems”, for example — may now be addressed more successfully.

Administration and policy in mental health

Expert witnesses and the evidence they provide occupy a unique and privileged position in the U.S. justice system. Put simply, expert witnesses can do things that other witnesses cannot do. Whereas lay or fact witnesses are typically limited to testifying about what they saw or heard, expert witnesses in most jurisdictions and in most legal contexts can offer opinions, including opinions on the ultimate legal issue, and they can rely on inadmissible evidence in reaching their opinions. Given the credentials required to be an expert witness and the unique nature of their testimony, expert witnesses have the potential to wield tremendous power in influencing judges and juries. The extraordinary role of expert witnesses and expert evidence had led courts and legislatures to formulate various frameworks for determining who should be recognized as an expert and what type of expert evidence should be admitted. Several influential court decisions have established admissibility criteria for expert evidence in U.S. courts. In Frye v. United States (1923), the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that proffered expert evidence must be based on generally accepted scientific methods. Specifically, the federal appellate court held that “the thing from which the deduction is made must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs” (p. 1014). This “general acceptance” test was the predominant admissibility standard for expert evidence in U.S. courts, and it remained largely unchallenged for more than half a century. Seventy years after Frye, in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993), the Supreme Court of the United States held that Frye had been superseded by the Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE); the FRE was adopted in 1975 and therefore did not exist when Frye was decided in 1923. Specifically, the Supreme Court held that FRE 702, not Frye, governed the admissibility of expert testimony. In their gatekeeping function after Daubert, trial court judges were tasked with determining whether proffered expert evidence is scientific knowledge that will assist the trier of fact. To assist trial court judges in this new role, the Supreme Court in Daubert articulated four criteria that courts can consider when determining admissibility under FRE 702, including whether the proffered evidence (a) was derived from methodology that has or can be tested empirically, (b) has been subjected to peer review and publication, (c) has a known or documented potential rate of error, and (d) has achieved general acceptance in its relevant scientific community. The Supreme Court believed that its interpretation of FRE 702 was consistent with the liberal thrust of the FRE. A later decision from the Supreme Court held that Daubert applies to all forms of expert evidence, not just the scientific expert evidence that was at issue in Daubert (see Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, 1999). Daubert is the admissibility standard in all federal courts, and most states have adopted Daubert or a close derivative (see Slobogin, Hafemeister, Mossman, & Reisner, 2014). Whether trial court judges are functioning as effective gatekeepers for expert testimony is an empirical question that calls for well-conducted research. Given the rate at which expert testimony is being offered by psychologists (see Melton et al., 2018), examining whether the assessment methods used by psychologists satisfy the Daubert criteria has clear importance. Neal, Slobogin, Saks, Faigman, and Geisinger (2019) answered the call in their ambitious, rigorous, and timely study of the admissibility of psychological assessment tools. In their article, Neal et al. (2019) report on the results of their two-part investigation of psychological assessment tools in legal contexts. Using the results from 23 previous surveys of forensic mental health professionals, they first conducted a systematic review of the 364 psychological assessment tools that psychologists have reported using in legal contexts. In the second part of their article, they provide a detailed analysis of admissibility challenges 894336 PPIXXX10.1177/1529100619894336DeMatteo et al.Commentary research-article2020

Expert Evidence: The (Unfulfilled) Promise of Daubert.

Substance use and crime.

Recent immigration trends indicate that the United States is home to a remarkably diverse and rapidly growing population of displaced persons. Many of these individuals have survived exceptional trauma and are thus particularly vulnerable to trauma-related behavioral health disorders. Mental health professionals are commonly asked to assess immigrants within this population in the service of immigration court decision making. These assessments present a variety of challenges for clinicians, including the assessment and documentation of trauma-related symptoms across cultural bounds. The Trauma Symptom Inventory-2 (TSI-2) may be uniquely suited to the demands of immigration court assessments, but it has not been previously examined in a culturally diverse sample. The current study provided an examination of the TSI-2 within a sample of immigrants with histories of trauma. De-identified TSI-2 data were drawn from several clinicians' existing immigration assessment files. Reliability and standardization sample comparison results indicated that the TSI-2 exhibits sufficient internal consistency within this population, and that immigrants with histories of trauma generally respond similarly to individuals in trauma-specific clinical samples (with several notable exceptions). Specific clinical implications are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Assessing "credible fear": A psychometric examination of the Trauma Symptom Inventory-2 in the context of immigration court evaluations.

Despite the general lack of legal guidance in defining the minimum standard for juvenile competency to proceed, such evaluations are frequently requested. Research suggests that younger adolescents are found incompetent at higher rates than adults and may have unique deficits due to their developmental immaturity. Evaluators must consider these potential deficits when applying the Dusky standard to juvenile evaluations, and make reasonable recommendations regarding the likelihood of the achievement of competence if developmental immaturity plays a fundamental role. This case vignette illustrates how to evaluate and consider developmental immaturity when applying the Dusky standard to juvenile competency to proceed.

Evaluation of Juvenile Competency to Proceed: Applying the Dusky Standard

The case of John versus Im (2002) stands for the proposition that clinical neuropsychologists are not qualified to diagnose traumatic brain injury. This ruling by the Supreme Court of Virginia prohibits neuropsychologists from testifying about these professional conclusions in the courtroom. However, in clinical practice neuropsychologists are often asked to disentangle the relative contribution of brain dysfunction and psychological factors to presenting symptomology. In the proposed submission, the authors provide an analysis of the neuropsychological testimony at issue in John versus Im using the admissibility standards for expert testimony that were established and refined by a trilogy of cases from the Supreme Court of the United States. The paper provides support for the notion that neuropsychological method has an established scientific base of knowledge, standards for clinical competence, and evidence of peer-reviewed acceptance by medical related disciplines. No other scientific discipline has employed a more rigorous methodology for assessing cognitive function and disentangling the relative contributions of brain dysfunction and psychological factors to presenting symptomology. By limiting the testimony of neuropsychologists as to cause of an individual's cognitive impairment, courts will exclude opinions based on scientific research and specialized knowledge that would assist in the trier of fact.

David DeMatteo

Papers

Expert Evidence: The (Unfulfilled) Promise of Daubert.

Substance use and crime.

Assessing "credible fear": A psychometric examination of the Trauma Symptom Inventory-2 in the context of immigration court evaluations.

Evaluation of Juvenile Competency to Proceed: Applying the Dusky Standard

Neuropsychologists diagnose traumatic brain injury.