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In The Dark, Inclusive: A Summary

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The clinical assessment I find most interesting, even if it's not always the most reliable, is psychophysiological tests. These sorts of tests measure our bodies physiological responses to a certain stimulus which could determine if we have any sort of underlying psychological issue. (Comer, 2014) Physiological responses include changes in blood pressure, accelerating or decreasing heartbeats, breathing patterns, and body temperature. (Comer, 2014) The most well known example of a psychophysiological test is the lie detector or polygraph test. When this test is administered, the person having the test done sits in a chair and as the book describes on page 78, “electrodes attached to various parts of a person’s body detect changes in breathing, perspiration and heart …show more content…

(Comer, 2014) In the article entitled “In the Dark, Inclusive: The truth about lie detector tests”, the author talks about how lie detector results have been incredibly false; “..Gary Ridgway, known as the Green River Killer and the Russian mole Aldrich Ames, who used so-called "countermeasures" to beat polygraphs twice in the 1980s and early 1990s...Conversely, innocent people have failed the polygraph, like Bill Wegerle, who was suspected of killing his wife in 1986 until DNA evidence traced the murder to BTK killer Dennis Rader”(Baran and Vogel, In the Dark, Inclusive: The truth about lie detector tests, apmreports.org). Whoever is administering the test must also know exactly what they are doing so that no errors are made. (Comer, 2014) I have also wondered personally before if someone who takes the test is known to have struggled with anxiety previously would get a bad reading from the machine, even if they are telling the truth. What if someone’s fear is strong enough to decide their fate? It could easily put the wrong people in jail and in turn, allow the wrong people to be set

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