Evaluations for competency to stand trial are distinguished from other areas of forensic consultation by their long history of standardized assessment beginning in the 1970s. As part of a special issue of the Journal on evidence-based forensic practice, this article examines three published competency measures: the MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool-Criminal Adjudication (MacCAT-CA), the Eval...

In this essay I sketch the background that gave rise to adaptive testing and frame a discussion of CAT’s progress around Bert Green’s expectations of the advantages of this technology. Data from the first decade of operational CATs are used to compare what has happened to what was hoped for. I find that some of the goals for CAT that Green expressed are close to being accomplished, but that mos...

OBJECTIVE To present the conceptual and methodological backgrounds for development of the MacArthur Assessment Battery for Middle Childhood and one of its constituent instruments, the MacArthur Health and Behavior Questionnaire (HBQ). METHOD As a component of HBQ development, research addressing "developmental psychopathology" as a nosological category of human disorder was reviewed. Such res...

Cross-validation is an important evaluation strategy in behavioral predictive modeling; without it, a predictive model is likely to be overly optimistic. Statistical methods have been developed that allow researchers to straightforwardly cross-validate predictive models by using the same data employed to construct the model. In the present study, cross-validation techniques were used to constru...

OBJECTIVE A dimensional approach to the characterization of delusions was used to examine the use of non-content-related descriptors of delusions in revealing differences across diagnostic categories and delusion types. METHOD Interviews with 1,136 acutely hospitalized psychiatric patients identified subjects as definitely or possibly delusional on the basis of screening questions derived fro...

. J.D. Candidate, Vanderbilt Law School; Ph. D. Candidate in Neuroscience, Vanderbilt University. . McKnight Land-Grant Professor & Associate Professor of Law, University of Minnesota; Executive Director of Education and Outreach, MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience. . Coauthors listed beyond the second author are listed alphabetically by last name. . Harrison Foundati...