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PURPOSE AND GOALS

The track embraces the scientist/practitioner model of doctoral training.   This model maintains the primacy of research training while also providing necessary training in applied work such as evaluation research and policy development.  As detailed below, the program trains students to contribute to the development of knowledge in the field as academicians and applied researchers and to provide professional psychological expertise to and within the criminal and civil justice systems. The track is designed with an emphasis on research training drawing on areas of psychology such as social, cognitive, industrial/organizational and experimental psychology, decision and policy sciences, evaluation research methods and clinical forensic psychology.

The educational goals are derived from the scientist-practitioner model and are as follows:

1.  To prepare students to develop and conduct independent basic-science research in the field of forensic psychology;

2.  To prepare students to assume academic positions and leading roles in forensic psychology as it develops as an emerging field--a flexible curriculum and access to the broad array of graduate courses taught in the CUNY system assure that it is possible for students to develop specialties in areas such as social, developmental, and cognitive psychology and research methods and statistics--all of which will broaden employment prospects in academic and other settings;

3.  To prepare students to provide forensic psychological expertise within and in response to the needs of the legal system, including serving as researchers, consultants and experts to the legal profession, legislatures, the courts, law enforcement, correctional agencies, and the legal system generally;

4.  To help students develop a critical perspective on the legal system and to enable them to develop and analyze psychologically-informed public policy relevant to legal settings.

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EXPERIMENTAL FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY FACULTY

Experimental faculty research interests cluster around a set of issues:  

Detection of Deception (Crossman, Hartwig, Markus)
Expert Evidence (Groscup, Kovera, O’Connor, Penrod)
Family/Systems (Fondacaro, Widom)
Gender Issues (Gerber, O’Connor)
Interrogation and Confessions  (Dysart, Hartwig, Kassin)
Juries (Groscup, Kassin, Kovera, Leippe, O'Connor, Penrod)
Policing/Investigation (Gerber, Hartwig, Kassin., Salfati)
Procedural Justice (Fondacaro, Penrod)
Witnesses (Crossman, Dysart, Kassin, Kovera, Leippe, Penrod)

Experimental Forensic Psychology Faculty at John Jay College

Angela Crossman, Ph.D. (Cornell) conducts research on children's memory, suggestibility, testimony, & credibility; deception and false belief.

Jennifer Dysart, Ph.D. (Queens) conducts research on eyewitness accuracy, the use of show-ups and mug shot searching on identification accuracy, false confessions and interrogator suggestibility

Mark Fondacaro JD (Columbia), PhD (Indiana)  Procedural justice research, multi-cultural competency and decisionmaking, adolescent aggression, school violence, and family conflict resolution

Gwendolyn Gerber, Ph.D. (UCLA), whose research focuses on police psychology; gender issues in forensic psychology; and personality issues in forensic psychology.

Jennifer Groscup, J.D. (Nebraska), Ph.D. (Nebraska) conducts research on legal decision making; jury and judicial behavior; expert testimony; and scientific evidence.  Her research is supported by NSF. Dr. Groscup is an action editor of Law and Human Behavior.

Maria Hartwig, Ph.D. (Gotenborg) studies the detection of deception and methods of police interrogation.

Saul Kassin, (Connecticut) conducts research on police interviewing, interrogation, and the elicitation of confessions, eyewitness identifications and testimony, and jury decision-making.

Margaret Bull Kovera, Ph.D. (Minnesota) whose research activities encompass jury behavior; scientific evidence; litigation consulting; sexual harassment; legal decision making; eyewitness identification.  Dr. Kovera’s research has had continuous funding from NSF for more tha a decade, Prior to coming to CUNY, Dr. Kovera was the Director of the Legal Psychology Ph.D. programat Florida International University.  Dr. Kovera is currently a member of the executive committee of the American Psychology-Law Society and an action editor of Law and Human Behavior.

Michael Leippe, PhD (Ohio State)--begins Fall 2007, social influence and attitude change, eyewitness accuracy and confidence, and evaluation of eyewitnesses by jurors, police, and others

Keith Markus, Ph.D. (CUNY) conducts research on test validity; interpretation of quantitative models; structural equation modeling; discourse analysis, organizational culture.  Professor Markus often works with students doing research on various topics involving measurement issues, causal models, or innovative methodologies. He has sponsored and/or collaborated in research involving domestic violence, deception detection, selection and training of forensic psychology students, and other topics.

Maureen O’Connor, J.D. (Arizona), Ph.D. (Arizona), is Chair of the Psychology Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and also has appointments on the faculty of the doctoral programs in Forensic Psychology, Social/Personality Psychology, and Criminal Justice at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She received her J.D. and her Ph.D. in Law, Psychology, and Policy, from the University of Arizona (with a minor in Organizational Behavior). Her research interests are in the intersection of psychology and law generally, and psychology, gender, and law more specifically. Current projects include work on stalking and sexual harassment, with particular focus on lay and legal definitions of those concepts, and a project examining jurors’ responses to defendants raising an insanity defense. Another scholarly interest is in the use of scientific information and expert testimony in the legal system. Prior to attending graduate school, Dr. O’Connor worked for six years in the research and grants agencies of the U.S. Department of Justice, including serving as the Research Director of President Reagan’s Task Force on Victims of Crime. After receiving her law degree, Dr. O’Connor served as law clerk to the Honorable Patricia M. Wald, then-Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and is a member of the bar in Arizona and Washington, D.C. She serves on the Editorial Board of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law and is a member of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York Committee on Women in the Profession.

Steven Penrod (Distinguished Professor),  J.D. (Harvard), Ph.D. (Harvard), recent past-President of the American Psychology-Law Society, co-editor of Psychology, Crime and Law, the official journal of the European Association of Psychology and Law and a member of the editorial board of a number of other journals;  a researcher with over 25 years of nearly continuous research support from the Law and Social Sciences Division of NSF, Dr. Penrod was formerly full professor of psychology at Wisconsin, professor of law at Minnesota and directed the J.D./Ph.D. program at Nebraska before coming to John Jay.  His Ph.D. students and post-docs can be found on the faculties of universities such as UC-Santa Barbara, Barnard, Syracuse, and UNC-Charlotte, at competing forensic psychology programs such as Florida International, Nebraska, and the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and in non-academic positions such as the Federal Judicial Center (the research wing for the federal courts).  Dr. Penrod's current research is supported by NSF and addresses eyewitness reliability issues and he is editor of Psychology, Public Policy and Law.

Gabrielle Salfati, Ph.D. (Liverpool) focuses her research on homicide and violent sexual crimes; offender profiling; classification of behavior & cross‑cultural comparisons; multidimensional research methodologies & applied research methods.

Cathy Widom, Ph.D. conducts longitudinal studies of neglected children

 

Experimental Forensic Psychology Doctoral Faculty elsewhere in CUNY

David Bearison, Ph.D. of the Graduate Center conducts research on children's cognitive, social, and emotional development, with particular regard to their peer relations and how they understand and adjust to trauma.  He is the Director of the Concentration in Psychology and Law at the Graduate Center.

Kay Deaux, Ph.D. of the Graduate Center conducts research on questions related to immigration including the definition and negotiation of ethnic identities; motivational processes that impact on academic performance; attitudes and stereotypes about immigrants and immigration; and the social representations of immigration in U.S. culture. She also has research interests in sexual harassment.

Joel Lefkowitz, Ph.D of the Graduate Center has interests in the area of fair employment.  He has led to his being retained as an expert in equal employment opportunity litigation by the United States Department of Justice, Department of Labor, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, as well as others. He has been involved as an expert in more than 50 legal cases of alleged racial discrimination against minorities, pay discrimination against women and age discrimination.

Michelle Fine, Ph.D. of the Graduate Center conducts research around questions of social injustice: when do we perceive social arrangements as unjust, and when do we blame victims? What are the contexts in which injustice is most pronounced and what are the ideological conditions in which unjust arrangements appear simply fair or deserved?  This research includes a focus on discrimination and prison education.

Martin Ruck, Ph.D. of the Graduate Center has research interests in: 1) the influence of social contexts on the development of children's and adolescents' understanding of human rights; 2) racial and ethnic minority students' perceptions of authority and police in schools; 3) cultural identity and perceptions of educational opportunity in Black Canadian youth; and 4) the relationship between perceptions of social exclusion and experiences of injustice in children and youth of color.

Herb Saltzstein, Ph.D. at the G.C.—his current research includes: (a) children's and adolescents' eyewitness testimony is being studied within a combined moral development and decision-making framework; (b) cross-race eyewitness testimony is being studied within a combined social and decision-making framework; (c) studying moral reasoning and suggestibility in the U.S. & Brazil and (d) the meaning of moral affects (guilt and shame) across cultures.

Other CUNY faculty with an interest in experimental forensic psychology

Kristin Sommer, Ph.D. at Baruch-- whose research on motivated decision‑making in groups includes research on jury decisionmaking.

Jason Young, Ph.D. at Hunter whose research examines the impact of the media on peoples' attitudes toward current news issues--including fear of crime.

Other John Jay Assets

With respect to John Jay College, it is one of the preeminent academic institutions in the United States in the field of criminal justice.  The College is also the base for the Criminal Justice Ph.D. program which serves as an important complement to the Forensic Psychology subprogram.  Students in these programs are able to avail themselves of doctoral faculty, courses and colloquia in both programs. 

The Psychology Department at the College runs an extremely successful Master of Arts program in Forensic Psychology.  The M.A. program currently has more than 450 registered students.  This program has a national reputation with students coming from across the country as well as locally to attend the program.  Application for admission is competitive with more than a third of the applicants denied admission.   Interest in the program has steadily increased over the past decade. 

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EXPERIMENTAL FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY AS A SPECIALTY  

 Over the past two decades, there has been a burgeoning of knowledge in forensic psychology.  Evidence of this growth is seen in the development of professional journals in forensic psychology, such as Law and Human Behavior, Behavioral Sciences and the Law, Criminal Justice and Behavior, Psychology, Public Policy and the Law, Psychology, Crime, and the Law and Criminological Psychology--each of which has a substantial, if not predominant, focus on non-clinical aspects of forensic psychology.    This growth in specialized journals is coupled with a growing prominence of (both non-clinical and clinical) forensic psychological research in prominent journals such as the Journal of Applied Psychology, American Psychologist, Applied Cognitive Psychology, Child Abuse & Neglect, Current Directions in Psychological Science, Developmental Psychology, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Memory and Cognition, Perception, Psychological Science and others). 

 There has also been significant development and rapid growth of a division devoted to psychology and law within the American Psychological Association (Division 41 American Psychology-Law Society), the growth of a number of organizations with specific interest in forensic psychology, such as the European Association of Psychology and Law and parallel organizations in Australia/New Zealand, South Korea and Japan and the growth of interdisciplinary organizations such Law and Society Association which include significant representation from the forensic psychology community.    Recent articles in leading journals (Bersoff et al., 1997; Brigham, 1999; Ogloff et al., 1999) have addressed the growing need for forensic specialists, the need for increased training, and the importance of developing training models.  

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 Career Opportunities 

 Students graduating with a Ph.D. from the Experimental Forensic Psychology track in the Forensic Psychology subprogram will have several career directions open to them: the academic setting; clinical forensic positions that involve direct service; and administrative forensic positions.  Job opportunities within psychology are projected to grow over the next several years with particular growth in forensic areas, especially drug and alcohol abuse counseling, working with the mentally ill in forensic settings, juveniles at risk and correctional psychology.  Much of the focus of training in Experimental Forensic Psychology track will be preparation for academic and research positions.