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Setting the Record Straight: Comment on Gurley, Piechowski, Sheehan, and Gray (2014) on the Admissibility of the Rorschach Performance Assessment System (R-PAS) in Court

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Abstract

Gurley et al. (Psychological Injury and Law 7:9–17, 2014) express reservations about the admissibility of testimony based on the Rorschach Performance Assessment System (R-PAS) in court. They question whether there is sufficient evidentiary foundation in the underlying psychometrics and adequate general acceptance among psychologists for R-PAS-based testimony to meet either the Daubert or Frye criteria for admissibility and also raise doubts about how well it meets the criteria for the use of forensic tests proposed by Heilbrun (Law and Human Behavior 16:257–272, 1992). This invited comment addresses their concerns about the admissibility of R-PAS-based testimony and corrects some erroneous statements about the psychometrics of R-PAS and the pertinent empirical literature. Gurley et al. characterize R-PAS as being in competition with the established Comprehensive System (CS; Exner 2003), though we clarify that it is actually an evolutionary development from the CS and designed to be a replacement for it. We also point out how their conclusion that R-PAS-based forensic testimony may be hazardous or premature is based on an insufficient familiarity with the R-PAS scientific and professional literature, a misinterpretation of the Frye and Daubert evidentiary standards, and a mischaracterization of several of Heilbrun’s (Law and Human Behavior 16:257–272, 1992) criteria for the use of tests in forensic testimony.

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Notes

  1. The third edition of Volume 2 on advanced interpretation was published in 2005 by Exner and Erdberg, though it did not contain any changes relative to the 2003 volume.

  2. Specific figures are not available, but we know that challenges to Rorschach testimony are historically rare and that none of the many R-PAS users in forensic settings has ever made us aware of having faced a challenge over it.

  3. Detailed discussions concerning how and why R-PAS-based testimony meets the Frye and Daubert standards extending beyond the scope of this comment are available elsewhere (Erard 2012; Erard and Viglione 2014).

  4. Judge Alex Kozinski, in his decision on remand in Daubert II (1995), interpreted the general acceptance guideline as an expectation that experts “can show that they have followed the scientific method as it is practiced by (at least) a recognized minority of scientists in their field” (p. 1,319).

  5. Gurley et al. criticize the Rorschach for having fewer peer-reviewed articles than the MMPI-2. Given that the MMPI-2 is by far the most widely researched personality test in history, its level of general acceptance can hardly been used as a minimal standard!

  6. See also fn 4, supra.

  7. Justice Breyer in Kumho (1999) illustrates this point with the observation, “it might not be surprising in a particular case, for example, that a claim made by a scientific witness has never been the subject of peer review, for the particular application at issue may never previously have interested any scientist” (p. 226).

  8. The psychometrics of the instrument were discussed in considerably more detail by Meyer and Eblin (2012) in the same PIL Special Issue, but this article was not considered by Gurley et al. Much more detailed discussions of these matters are available in the Technical Manual section of Meyer et al. (2011).

  9. The mean Cohen’s d is .05—1/20 of a standard deviation (see Table 16.9 in Meyer et al. 2011). Standard deviations were also generally smaller for scores obtained through R-PAS administration, which was also an intended effect.

  10. If for some reason a forensic examiner does not find the existing data on the merits of R-Optimized administration and the sturdiness of the R-Optimized modeled norms to be sufficiently compelling, he or she can still use the legacy CS administration procedures. When entering a protocol for scoring on the R-PAS website (www.r-pas.org), all such an examiner has to do is click the option to indicate CS administration was used and the data will be normed on the full R-PAS sample of 1,396 CS-administered protocols, rather than the 640 R-Optimized modeled records. This is not the default option for R-PAS because we believe that controlling the historical problem of excess variability in R is most important to accurate interpretation.

  11. Recent research also supports the cross-cultural utility of R-PAS to differentiate severity of disturbance with clinical and nonclinical samples in Taiwan (Su 2012).

  12. Gurley et al. never explained how this supposed deficiency in the universality of the normative sample might have anything to do with the admissibility of R-PAS-based testimony in US courts.

  13. Gurley et al. were apparently confused by the two sources just cited. In the R-PAS manual, Meyer et al. provided the data that were ultimately published in more detail as a journal article by Viglione et al., and Meyer et al. cited the data in the manual as coming from the Viglione et al. article, which at the time was a manuscript submitted for publication (see Meyer et al. 2011, p. 435).

  14. All non-CS variables in R-PAS also have strong empirical support. Gurley et al. claimed that R-PAS includes “other variables that lacked empirical support but that clinicians thought were useful” (p. 5). As explained in detail in Chapter 15 of the manual, R-PAS does include some long-established CS variables that were not strongly supported in Mihura et al. (2013), but that nevertheless were well supported in a survey of experienced clinicians (Meyer et al. 2013) and also had a strong response process foundation for interpretation. We should also point out that the description of Gurley et al. (2014, p. 8ff) of the Mihura et al. meta-analyses is rife with misunderstandings and misreadings. For instance, they asserted that the samples included in the analyses were focused only on depressed or psychotic patients, which is not true. They also made incorrect statements about the number of effect sizes derived from fully structured interviews, and the number of samples and participants contributing data to the externally assessed criteria. It also was incorrect for Gurley et al. to have asserted that the results from the meta-analyses were not included in the R-PAS manual; those results form the foundation for the statements made throughout Chapter 15 on Variable Selection and Validity.

  15. Silverstein (2013) also has recently published a casebook in personality assessment describing R-PAS and illustrating its clinical utility.

  16. Presumably, Gurley et al. interpreted “objective tests” to mean “objectively scored” tests, such as the MMPI-2, but a careful reading of Heilbrun’s discussion here, which is all about clinical vs. actuarial prediction, shows that he was referring to measures of objective characteristics of individuals and the actuarial combination of these characteristics into a predictive formula. Both the Rorschach and the MMPI-2 provide “objective” measures of behavior, but neither is as “objective” in Heilbrun’s sense as an instrument that confines itself to demographic facts about the individual.

  17. Both of these actuarial instruments actually require some judgment in scoring as well.

  18. In a more recent publication, Heilbrun referred to the use of psychological testing to measure response style as an “emerging” rather than an “established” principle (Heilbrun et al. 2004).

  19. Lambda is computed as (Pure Form responses / Non-Pure Form responses) and F% is computed as (Pure Form Responses / All Responses), and as such, one is an algebraic transformation of the other.

  20. See fn 19, supra.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychological Institutes of Michigan, P.C., 7457 Franklin Road, Suite 210, Bloomfield Township, MI, 48301, USA

    Robert E. Erard

  2. University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA

    Gregory J. Meyer

  3. Alliant International University, San Diego, CA, USA

    Donald J. Viglione

Authors
  1. Robert E. Erard
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  2. Gregory J. Meyer
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  3. Donald J. Viglione
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Correspondence to 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 authors have a financial interest.

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Erard, R.E., Meyer, G.J. & Viglione, D.J. Setting the Record Straight: Comment on Gurley, Piechowski, Sheehan, and Gray (2014) on the Admissibility of the Rorschach Performance Assessment System (R-PAS) in Court. Psychol. Inj. and Law 7, 165–177 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12207-014-9195-x

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