Empathy and the expert witness

This paper argues that the expert witness who offers empathic testimony may significantly assist the trial lawyer in defending certain personal injury cases. The author considers his own congenital deformity from a subjective and objective analysis of experience. He then uses this deformity and the analysis to illustrate empathic testimony. A courtroom example is given. The conclusion argues the importance of permitting the experience of psychic trauma to speak for itself. It is also concluded that such experience and its analysis cannot be easily refuted as psychological projection. Trial lawyers could find the use of empathic testimony and its analysis of experience an effective tactic.     

The school psychologist as expert witness in due process hearings

As a consequence of the Consent Agreement reached between the Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, school of psychologists are finding themselves increasingly in the role of expert witness in due process hearings. The paper identifies a number of problems regarding the witness behavior of psychologists in these hearings and proposes some recommendations and resolutions.     

Awareness of one's body as subject and object

Abstract

This paper rejects Hume's famous claim that we never perceive our selves, by arguing that, under conditions specified, our perception of our bodies is perception of our selves. It takes as its point of departure Quassim Cassam's defence of a position to a similar effect but puts a different interpretation on the distinction between perceiving the body as an object, having spatial attributes, and perceiving it as a self or subject of experiences.     

The role of the psychologist expert witness: Provider of perspective and input

The definition and role of the expert witness is reviewed. Two conceptual systems for viewing the world, the scientific method and the adversarial system, are compared. The reconciliation and integration of these two discrepant systems are discussed in terms of input versus outcome. The rules of evidence, as well as problems of communication between the systems, are reviewed with the aim of providing expert witnesses with a better understanding of effective testimony. Finally, collaboration between the two systems is called for in order to provide guidelines for both neuropsychologists and attorneys.     

Mental competence and the question of beneficent intervention

The authors examine recent arguments purporting to show that mental incompetence (lack of decision-making capacity) is not a necessary condition for intervention in a person's best interests without consent. It is concluded that these arguments fail to show that competent wishes could justifiably be overturned. Nonetheless, it remains an open question whether accounts of decision-making capacity based solely on the notions of understanding and appreciation can adequately deal with various complexities. Different possible ways of resolving these complexities are outlined, all of which need further exploration.     

Awareness, conditioning, and information processing in complex learning situations

Lindahl, Maj-Britt. Awareness, conditioning, and information processing in complex learning situations. Scand. J. Psychol., 1973, 14, 121–130.-Learning without awareness was studied with a method involving three phases for each of 2. 10 subjects: (1) a problem solving phase, (2) a phase of applying the solution found in (1), and (3) a test phase. In (2) the solution was applied to the classification of 50 successively presented instances. These were in one condition sampled so that a perceptually easily discriminable basis of classification obtained that was different from and redundant to the one of the solution of phase (1). The results of the test phase showed that this redundant basis of classification influenced the performance of the subjects in this condition despite unawareness of it according to verbal reports. The phenomenon was interpreted as a case of learning without awareness, describable in conditioning terms, that influenced performance. The limitations of this type of learning were discussed, and its relationship to an aware information processing type of learning was outlined.     

New application of psychology to law: Improving forensic evidence and expert witness contributions

Psychology has made a tremendous contribution to law by showing the malleability of eyewitness perception and memory, and developing best practices for obtaining eyewitness identifications. We suggest that even expert scientific witnesses, which the court heavily relies on as objective and impartial, are also susceptible to bias from various psychological influences. For example, forensic examiners’ interactions with detectives and exposure to information about the case can bias their judgments. We discuss the ten commentaries on these issues across a range of forensic science domains, and affirm what reforms are needed.     

Enhanced visuomotor learning and generalization in expert surgeons

Although human motor learning has been intensively studied for many decades, it remains unknown whether group differences are present in expert cohorts that must routinely cope with and learn new visuomotor mappings such as expert minimally invasive surgeons. We found that expert surgeons compensate for a visuomotor perturbation more rapidly than naive controls. Modelling indicates that these differences in expert behavioural performance reflects greater trial-to-trial retention, as opposed to greater trial-to-trial learning rate. We also found that surgeons generalize to novel reach directions more broadly than controls, a result which was subsequently confirmed by our modelling. In general, our findings show that minimally invasive surgeons exhibit enhanced visuomotor learning and spatial generalization.     

A comparison of correlation, calibration, and diagnosticity as measures of the confidence-accuracy relationship in witness identification

The relationship between witness confidence and accuracy (CA) has traditionally been measured by the point-biserial correlation (rpb). Recently, 2 alternative indices for measuring the CA relation have been proposed, namely calibration and diagnosticity analyses (e.g., P. Juslin, N. Olsson, & A. Winman, 1996). In this study, the 3 measures were compared quantitatively using 52 independent data sets. The measures rpb and calibration were weakly correlated, whether computed across earwitness data sets, eyewitness data sets, or all data. Thus, when applied to the same data, these 2 measures sometimes yield different conclusions. A modest relation was observed between the rpb and the diagnosticity of confidence. Finally, calibration and degree of over- and underconfidence covaried with task difficulty, consistent with K. A. Deffenbachers' (1980) optimality hypothesis.     

Thinking about the body as subject

The notion of immunity to error through misidentification (IEM) has played a central role in discussions of first-person thought. It seems like a way of making precise the idea of thinking about oneself ‘as subject’. Asking whether bodily first-person judgments (e.g. ‘My legs are crossed’) can be IEM is a way of asking whether one can think about oneself simultaneously as a subject and as a bodily thing. The majority view is that one cannot. I rebut that view, arguing that on all the notions of IEM that have so far been successfully defined, bodily first-person judgments can be IEM.     

Empathy and viewing the other as a subject

Empathy and viewing another person as a subject rather than an object are often associated in theoretical contexts, but empirical research of the relation is scarce. The purpose of the present research was to investigate the relationship between subject/object view and empathy. In Study 1, participants watched film clips and indicated their empathy for specific characters in the clips, as well as the extent to which they saw these persons as subjects and objects. The subject/object view explained some, but not all, of the differences in empathy, which raised the question of what else accounts for differences in empathy. A second study was conducted to investigate whether the difficulty of the other's situation also contributes. In Study 2, another group watched the film clips and rated the difficulty of the film character's situations in addition to empathy and subject/object view. The results of Study 2 revealed that subject view/object and perceived difficulty together explain a substantial part of differences in empathy. It was concluded that empathy is evoked primarily when a person in difficulty is viewed as a subject.     

Sin,shame, and the subject

In this chapter I revisit construals of sin and shame, beginning with a moment of auto-investigation. I then set this data in conversation with historical, theological, and philosophical configurations of shame to reconceive sin and shame. I describe sin as curvatus ex carne (turning from the flesh) to signal sin as a refusal of both our embodied existence and a commodification of the land on which it lives. I then use a carnal hermeneutic to argue for a positive understanding of discerning shame as a resource for an ethical life that contrasts with shame of disgrace.     

The influence of lawyers' questions on witness accuracy,confidence, and reaction times and on mock jurors' interpretation of witness accuracy

Two studies demonstrate the influence of lawyers' complex questions on mock‐witness accuracy, confidence, and reaction times and on the interpretation of witness accuracy by mock jurors. In study one, 32 mock witnesses were shown a short film and then questioned either with lawyers' complex questions or simple alternatives. In Study 2, 20 mock jurors viewed video footage of the mock witnesses assigned to each of the two previous conditions and were asked to rate their confidence in the witnesses' answers. The findings of the two studies indicated that lawyers' use of confusing questions reduce not only accuracy but also speed of response and both witnesses' and jurors' ability to determine accuracy. The implication of these findings is straightforward, lawyers should ask simple questions wherever possible. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Recognizing the infant as subject in infant-parent psychotherapy

Drawing on Winnicott's view of infants as subjects entitled to an intervention in their own right, infants as the referred patient have been seen in infant-parent psychotherapy for 20 years at the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, Australia. This is a radically different view of infant symptomatology than viewing it as only expressing an aspect of the mother's unconscious. The clinical pathway differentiates the therapy from much parent-infant psychotherapy. The author describes the theoretical model of a twofold approach to understanding the infant's experience through interactive dialogue between therapist and infant, and sharing this understanding with the parents, and illustrates it with cases of failure-to-thrive infants. She discusses two criticisms: first, that infant-parent psychotherapy may undermine the parents and, second, that brief parent-infant psychotherapy does not alter parents' insecure attachment status. Videotaped sessions often show rapid improvement; parents generally feel relieved. This approach potentially shapes not only parents' and infants' representations, but also their implicit knowledge of relationships-partly, it is suggested, through activating the mirror neuron system to bring about implicit memory change. Change may therefore be longer lasting than psychoanalytic theory presently conceives. The approach is relevant in an outpatient setting: gains were maintained long term in 90% of out-patient cases.