Police Psychology:  The Police Brain

by Gary S. Aumiller. Ph.D.  ABPP

 

What if in the hiring process for police officers you could pick someone resistant to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, have the best ability to function under pressure, make good quick decisions with better accuracy than normal people, and someone who can control bias against minority groups.  At the same time, you could pick people that are good at setting priorities, good at organizing events, good at weeding out distractions, and good at orchestrating outcomes.  In shoot-no shoot situations, they get better scores and make better decisions on protecting themselves.  Sounds like that might be valuable, huh?  This was the presentation at the IACP Psychological Services Section by a brilliant psychologist named Dr. Mark Zelig who advocated for some level neurological testing as an addition to the standard battery for testing policemen for departments.  It also happens to fall in line with some of my thoughts.  What if neurological testing could actually help predict who is better capable of doing the job?

Most pre-employment psychological testing looks for personality measures or measures of past behaviors.  It would look at previous arrests, or perhaps emotional stability factors that could lead to problems on the job.  A value of course, but what if neurological tests could test for these other factors that are seemingly just as important.  IQ tests and most cognitive tests measure intelligence and accumulated knowledge, but they don’t measure what you can do with your intelligence.  They don’t measure how you can make sense of things that happen in the real world.  They don’t measure whether you will persist or how you get things done.

Dr. Zelig reported that three areas of neurological functioning that are the most studied would give you data on the performance of the candidate after they were given a job.  The first area is the ability of the brain to inhibit, put the stop on an action and make a person think before a response.  A very serious executive function.  Next is in the area of working memory or internal RAM.  Not just how it is stored, but how it is updated and how it can last long enough to work through an extended project.  Finally, Dr. Zelig says shifting and adjusting to meet a new goal is a real neurological necessity.

I like to add being able to think out of the box to find a solution, but Dr. Zelig would probably put that in the last category.

We are opening up on a new field of neurological psychology that actually measures some of these attributes.  It actually measures whether you can keep from being distracted and whether you can think clearly and behave appropriately, particularly in high stress situations.  It tests whether you can sustain attention, prioritize appropriately and have the flexibility to search out other solutions when the path you are going down fails.   This area is called Executive Function and it can be and may be tested in the future of pre-employment screening or promotion within the police.

Let me give you one example of a neurological screening demonstrating the Stroop Effect.  I am not giving any secrets away, this is all over the internet.   

Say these colors:

 

 

 

Now read these words out loud:

 

 

Now say the colors again on these words.  Just the colors.

 

 

 Each stage would be timed and would be compared to norms for the test.  The measure of this part of executive functioning in this portion of a test is how much the meaning of the word interfered with your determining the colors.  Was there a huge time difference or not?  This is called the Stroop Effect, named after John Ridley Stroop who published about the effect in 1935.  (Although some say it was published in 1929 by a German scientist.)  Let’s just say it was a long time ago.

Now let me get real scientific on you.  All those scans they used on the brain (PET, CAT, MRI) show that the anterior cingulate cortex, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are the two areas activated by the Stroop effect.  So, if they can actually identify the place and the activity of the brain for this effect which is shown to be good, then at some point we may be able to select our cop by brain scans.  Twenty-Second century stuff maybe, but iy might be closer than you think.

This of course is just a single example and it is just one portion of one test.  There are many tests that really measure out the functions of the frontal lobe of the brain in decision making, organizing data, flexibility, working memory, etc. that can really affect the decisions that police officers and other first responders make.  If this becomes part of the battery given on selection and promotion, it could change the course of policing and first responder selection.  But before that becomes a reality it would have to undergo the scrutiny of experimentation and data collection and that can take years.

So, suffice it to say there is a future where the functions of the brain can determine some of the decisions made in policing, but we are not quite there yet.  We are getting close though.  For now, consider the value of executive function in your first responders.

 

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