predictor variable is negative) when used in this way
and that it can reliably screen out individuals who are
clearly competent to stand trial, thereby reducing the
number of individuals referred for more lengthy and
costly assessments. The FIT–R can also be used as
part of a more comprehensive fitness evaluation.Ronald Roesch and Kaitlyn McLachlanSee alsoAdjudicative Competence of Youth; Competency
Screening Test (CST); Competency to Stand Trial;
Evaluation of Competence to Stand Trial–Revised
(ECST–R); Forensic Assessment; Interdisciplinary Fitness
Interview (IFI); MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool
for Criminal Adjudication (MacCAT–CA)Further Readings
Grisso, T. (2003). Evaluating competencies: Forensic
assessment and instruments.New York: Plenum Press.
Roesch, R., Zapf, P. A., & Eaves, D. (2006). Fitness
Interview Test–Revised: A structured interview for
assessing competency to stand trial. Sarasota,
FL: Professional Resource Press.
Roesch, R., Zapf, P. A., Eaves, D., & Webster, D. (1998).
Fitness Interview Test–Revised Edition. Burnaby, BC,
Canada: Mental Health Law and Policy Institute.
Viljoen, J. L., Vincent, G. M., & Roesch, R. (2006).
Assessing adolescent defendants’ adjudicative
competence: Interrater reliability and factor structure of
the Fitness Interview Test–Revised. Criminal Justice and
Behavior, 33,467–487.
Zapf, P. A., & Roesch, R. (1997). Assessing fitness to stand
trial: A comparison of institution-based evaluations and a
brief screening interview. Canadian Journal of
Community Mental Health, 16,53–66.FORCEDCONFABULATION
Forced confabulation can occur if an individual erro-
neously incorporates into his or her memory of an
event, self-generated information that was not actually
part of that event. Forced confabulation most com-
monly occurs when an individual (a) experiences
an event, (b) thinks about or talks about that event, and
(c) later confuses what actually occurred with what he
or she talked about or thought about afterward. Every
time an individual makes an error of commission and
remembers a detail of an event that did not actuallyoccur, it is not necessarily confabulation. In the
research literature, forced confabulation is typically
caused by (a) forcing an individual to answer an unan-
swerable question about an event (i.e., the relevant
information to answer the questions was not actually
part of the event) or (b) pressing an individual to answer
a question even though the individual has indicated that
he or she does not know or is unsure of the answer to
the question. As a consequence, later, individuals will
sometimes erroneously remember the information in
their forced answer as part of the event itself. When this
occurs, it is considered to be forced confabulation.
A number of studies have been conducted to assess
how postevent information influences event memory.
This research examines how memory of an event can
be suggestively influenced by exposure to any related
information about the event. In most of this research,
the postevent information is other-generated (e.g.,
information in the interviewer’s questions can be
remembered as part of the actual event) rather than
self-generated, but in fact, either would qualify as
postevent information. Thus, forced confabulation is
really a subtype of suggestibility that can occur from
being forced to self-generate postevent information. A
certain amount of self-generated confabulation will
naturally occur as people think about and talk about
events that they have observed. Although people rarely
come to remember entire events that did not occur, it is
common to confuse (a) what we correctly remember
because we observed it with (b) what we erroneously
remember from contemplating the event afterward.
A typical study of forced confabulation was con-
ducted by Maria Zaragoza and her colleagues. They
had adults and children view a brief video, followed
immediately by a sequence of answerable and unan-
swerable questions. Unanswerable questions probed
information that was not actually presented in the
video. Half the participants were forced to answer
every question and were told to guess if they did not
know an answer. Control participants were told to
respond only to questions for which they knew the
answer; they were encouraged not to guess. One week
later, all participants were asked whether they had
seen various objects in the video. Individuals fre-
quently misattributed to the video objects that they
had self-generated.
One question of interest in the forced confabulation
research is whether information is more likely to be
incorporated into memory if it is (a) spontaneously
self-generated or (b) forcibly self-generated—for324 ———Forced ConfabulationF-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:42 PM Page 324