Describe personality testing in forensic psychology.

 Central to the psychological perspective is the idea that almost all causes of criminal behaviour originate in the personality. Personality is defined as the complex set of emotional and behavioural attributes that tend to remain relatively constant as the individual moves from situation to situation. Psychiatry goes a step further by postulating that mental illness and crime both have similar properties (in being responses to the same stressors and each having maladaptive qualities).

As long ago as 1870, Henry Maudsly, in his book, Body and Mind, wrote that criminals would go insane if they didn’t engage in crime. This is because their pathological urges must find expression in something. So, it has long been recognised that there is a strong relationship between mental illness and crime (not to say that one is the cause of another). Criminal adaptation to this condition of helplessness occurs because choosing crime over other possible alternatives provides certain psychological advantages or gratifications, which are as follows:

• Crime offers the possibility of excitement.

• Crime calls for the individual to maximise his faculties and talents which might otherwise lie dormant.

• Crime can relieve feelings of inner oppression and stress.

• Adopting the criminal role provides an excellent rationalisation for inadequacy.

• Deviant behaviour sometimes helps the criminal to form close and relatively nonoppressive relations with other criminals.

• Crime can provide pleasure or gratify needs.

One of the major purposes of personality test is to assess the match between a person’s personality profile and the required job profile, and thus screen out candidates. It is very likely that as part of job selection process a candidate will have to face a personality test. While the job interview examines the person’s overt behaviour, the personality test ‘aims’ to reach deeper, and expose those areas that the person may not be aware of, thereby providing recruiters with a more comprehensive profile of the candidate’s personality.

The information provided by the personality test, coupled with the interview and the other psychometric tests including aptitude tests, helps the evaluator to put the pieces together and get an overall impression of the applicant.

Thus, personality testing irrespective of it being used in forensic field or employment field or any other field, is used to gather information to allow psychologists to describe what a person is like, how the person functions or is likely to function with others, whether there is significant psychopathology, extent to which a person is open and transparent in self presentation or guarded or even deceptive and prognosis for improvement with treatment for mental health problems.

In forensic field the personality testing is utilised to address questions like risk assessment, mental illness diagnosis and treatment recommendations, competency and capacity, tort cases where emotional distress claims are made, and criminal cases where mental illness factors are being presented.

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