Neuropsychological Forensic Evaluations

Abstract

The early neuropsychological role in forensic evaluations was primarily in the civil rather than the criminal areas. Individuals would be injured in car accidents or as a result of medical practice or through negligence which would result in cognitive, personality, motor, or sensory problems. Evaluations were the traditional comprehensive evaluations which made sense since any problem arising from the injury was potentially of interest to the court. Slowly, there was increasing involvement of neuropsychologists in criminal cases as well. Initially, much of this work focused on the identification of mental retardation as a mitigating or explanatory concept in the criminal behavior of the client. Over time, this has spread to a wide variety of cases, especially in regard to the roles of the frontal lobes in criminal behavior.