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

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.

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