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Expert Testimony Using the Rorschach Performance Assessment System in Psychological Injury Cases

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Abstract

The Rorschach Performance Assessment System (R-PAS; Meyer et al. 2011) is a new system for administering, scoring, and interpreting the Rorschach Inkblot Test that is designed to make the best possible use of currently available scientific and clinical evidence. Many features of R-PAS are well-suited to forensic evaluation generally and to psychological evaluations in psychological injury cases in particular. Among them, R-PAS: (a) offers an alternative to self-report methods that adds incremental validity, (b) provides a useful check against exaggerated or minimized symptom presentation, (d) generates evidence concerning implicit traits and behavioral tendencies, (e) offers techniques for adjusting for abnormal response sets, (f) uses internationally applicable reference data that do not exaggerate or minimize pathology, (g) organizes results according to the strength of the evidence, and (h) presents results on which are interpretations are based in a manner easy for the intelligent layperson to grasp. Despite its recent formal introduction to the professional assessment community, R-PAS takes advantage of decades of research in peer-reviewed publications (including the insights of Rorschach critics) and builds on established validity and general acceptance for most of its procedures and features. The article describes the standards and criteria applying to expert psychological testimony in U.S. federal and state courts and applies them to Rorschach-based testimony in general and R-PAS-based testimony specifically. It is argued that when the system is properly used and applied and when such testimony is appropriately formulated, it should be found admissible in both state and federal courtrooms

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Notes

  1. For a more comprehensive discussion of these matters, see Faigman, Blumenthal, Cheng, Mnookin, Murphy, & Saunders (2011).

  2. To a large extent, traditional clinical testimony has historically escaped close scrutiny under the Frye standard, either because general acceptance was specifically assumed or because it was considered a less than fully scientific kind of expertise (Melton, Petrila, Poythress, & Slobogin, 2007). For example, in People v. Beckley (1990) the Michigan Supreme Court opined as follows:

    Psychologists, when called as experts, do not talk about things or objects; they talk about people. They do not dehumanize people with whom they deal by treating them as objects composed of interacting biological systems. Rather, they speak of the whole person… The experts in each case are merely outlining probable responses to a traumatic event [citation omitted]. It is clearly within the realm of all human experience to expect that a person would react to a traumatic event and that such reactions would not be consistent or predictable in all persons. Finally, there is a fundamental difference between techniques and procedures based on chemical, biological, or other physical sciences as contrasted with theories and assumptions that are based on the behavioral sciences…We would hold that so long as the purpose of the evidence is merely to offer an explanation for certain behavior, the Davis–Frye test is inapplicable. (p. 12).

    In a prior case, People v Martin (1971) the Michigan Supreme Court also doubted the reliability of “the field of human medicine” in criminal matters and declined to apply the Davis–Frye standard to expert psychiatric testimony.

  3. In his Introduction to the Federal Judicial Center reference manual on scientific evidence (2000) Justice Stephen Breyer offered the following commentary to clarify the intent of Daubert:

    The search is not a search for scientific precision. We cannot hope to investigate all the subtleties that characterize good scientific work. A judge is not a scientist, and a courtroom is not a scientific laboratory. But consider the remark made by the physicist, Wolfgang Pauli. After a colleague asked whether a certain scientific paper was wrong, Pauli replied, “That paper isn’t even good enough to be wrong!” Our objective is to avoid legal decisions that reflect that paper’s so-called science. The law must seek decisions that fall within the boundaries of scientifically sound knowledge. (p. 4).

  4. The trilogy consists of: Daubert (1993), General Electric v. Joiner (1997), and Kumho Tire (1999).

  5. As explained by Margaret Berger, writing for the Federal Judicial Center Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence (2000):

    The Court endorsed a nondoctrinaire, flexible approach that requires district courts to focus “upon the particular circumstances of the particular case at issue.” The Court did not develop further the technique it used in Daubert of pointing to particular factors that spell out reliability with regard to a particular kind of expertise. That is not to say that the factors discussed in Daubert are now irrelevant. They “may or may not be pertinent,” even with regard to expert scientific proof, depending on the issue, the expertise in question, and the subject of the expert’s testimony. The choice of factors to be used in determining reliability is also left to the trial court’s discretion. (p. 38; citations omitted).

    Among other guidelines that have been proposed, one of particular interest for R-PAS is from McCormick (1982): analogy to other scientific techniques whose results are admissible.

  6. Indeed, in California alone, the application of Kelly–Frye to as seemingly cut-and-dry a question as the admissibility of DNA-based evidence in criminal cases was the subject of a storm of legal controversy and widely varying judicial results (see Chan, 1995)

  7. Parsi, Berumen, and Packman (2011) wrote:

    With the clear and increasing studies evidencing the benefits of the newer RPAS [sic] system over the previous traditional Exner CS approach, it is curious why the RPAS system is not yet more admissible in forensic cases. The reason for this deficiency is that the ability for forensic psychologists to apply the most useful tool at their disposal lies in the “lag time” created between the time that a new scientific tool has been “vetted” by the developers’ peers and the time when its popularity can safeguard it from heated cross-examination. (p. 28).

  8. Similar systematically collected data concerning these variables with children and adolescents are not currently available. For this and other reasons, R-PAS users are cautioned to be particularly cautious and conservative in the inferences they draw based on Rorschach data obtained from children and younger adolescents.

  9. Mihura et al. (2012) studied only CS variables, of which most R-PAS variables (sometimes with minor modifications to improve reliable coding or validity) are a carefully selected subset. Those (non-CS) R-PAS variables not part of the Mihura et al. meta-analysis were selected for their particularly strong empirical support. Thus, we have reason to believe that Mihura et al.’s average effect size for CS variables substantially understates that for R-PAS.

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Philip Erdberg, Barbara Erard, Greg Meyer, and Donald Viglione for comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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    Robert E. Erard

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The R-PAS Manual, web-based scoring service, and other R-PAS products and services are sold by Rorschach Performance Assessment System LLC, in which the author has a financial interest.

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Erard, R.E. Expert Testimony Using the Rorschach Performance Assessment System in Psychological Injury Cases. Psychol. Inj. and Law 5, 122–134 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12207-012-9126-7

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