Forensic Psychological Assessment of Family Relationships: the Potential for a Psychosemantic Approach

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Abstract

This scientific review analyses the potential for applying the psychosemantic approach in researching semantic perception within the context of family relationships. The growing number of dysfunctional families leads to an increased divorce rate, with high-conflict spousal relationships often accompanied by parenting disagreements. This, in turn, increases the frequency of court-ordered psychological evaluations due to parenting disagreements in civil cases. There are many theoretical pathways when it comes to studying dysfunctional families and conflicts within families, as well as numerous practical approaches to dealing with them. However, both Russian and international research on dysfunctional family structures is mostly confined to predominantly phenomenogical analysis, as well as identifying formal characteristics, whereas the semantic analysis of family structures is largely neglected. We believe that one of the promising avenues in researching the family relationship system is the psychosemantic method: that is, the study of the semantic component of psychological relations: the emotional and semantic constructs underlying the semantic perception by the parents of each other and of their child.

General Information

Keywords: comprehensive forensic psychological and psychiatric examination, high-conflict family, spousal conflict, psychosemantics, family image

Journal rubric: Forensic and Clinical Psychology in Legal Context

Article type: scientific article

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17759/psylaw.2022120302

Received: 24.02.2022

Accepted:

For citation: Kulakov S. Forensic Psychological Assessment of Family Relationships: the Potential for a Psychosemantic Approach [Elektronnyi resurs]. Psikhologiya i pravo = Psychology and Law, 2022. Vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 14–26. DOI: 10.17759/psylaw.2022120302. (In Russ., аbstr. in Engl.)

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Information About the Authors

Sergey Kulakov, Researcher of the laboratory of psychology, Federal medical research center of psychiatry and addiction of the Ministry of health of the Russian Federation, Moscow, Russia, ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0203-1332, e-mail: novik_010979@mail.ru

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