PSY 3173 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Hillside Strangler, Factitious Disorder, Somatic Symptom Disorder

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 3173
• Professor: Marie- Lyne Laliberte

Document Summary

Malingering and deception and expert witness testimony (lecture 4) One of the objectives of the judicial process is to sort out who is telling the truth; therefore, the detection of deception is important. Psychologists have participated in the development of a variety of techniques to detect deception. The polygraph technique is one of the most well know technique to detect deception. The polygraph is a device for recording an individual"s autonomic nervous system responses. Polygraph tests rely on measuring physiological responses to different types of questions. Includes irrelevant questions that are unrelated to the crime, relevant questions concerning the crime being investigated, and comparison questions concerning the person"s honesty and past history prior to the event being investigated. Designed to determine if the person knows details about a crime. Tends to produce better results for guilty suspects than for innocent suspects. Many innocent suspects were classified as inconclusive or falsely identified as guilty (i. e. high false-positive rate)