Evaluations of competence to stand trial are evolving amid a national "competency crisis"

Across the United States, court orders for competence to stand trial (CST) evaluations and competence restoration services have been increasing much more rapidly than states can provide these services, prompting what has been called a national "competency crisis." The challenge in providing timely competence restoration services has, in several jurisdictions, prompted a change in competence evaluations. Evaluators are more often required to address broader clinical issues-such as recommending placement or addressing the urgency of hospitalization-rather than addressing only CST. This marks an evolving practice in forensic evaluation, which moves evaluators beyond the very narrow forensic question of competence and into more traditionally clinical recommendations. We describe several state examples of changing practice in order to highlight the initial barriers, and potential benefits, to addressing additional clinical issues in competence evaluations, amid a national competence crisis.

Desire for Success Awakens: Proof of Competence Restoration in a Non-competitive Environment

Pioneering studies reported that individuals who worked on a highly difficult task and experienced competence frustration beforehand would activate a restorative process and show enhanced autonomous motivation in a subsequent irrelevant activity. In this follow-up study, we explored the effect of prior competition outcome on one’s autonomous motivation in a subsequent non-competitive environment. According to our experimental manipulation, participants were randomly assigned to two treatment groups (a winning group and a losing group) and a control group. The experiment lasted for three sessions. Participants in the control group completed a single-player stop-watch (SW) task all along, while those in both treatment groups worked on a competitive SW task and competed for monetary rewards during Session 2 only. Electrophysiological data in Session 1 serve as the baseline and measure one’s trait-level autonomous motivation towards the SW game. For participants in the losing group, more pronounced difference wave of feedback-related negativity was observed in Session 3 compared with Session 1, suggesting enhanced autonomous motivation in Session 3. Such a pattern was observed in neither the winning group nor the control group. These results suggested that failure in a prior competition would activate one’s competence restoration in a subsequent non-competitive environment. Task difficulty and social competition are varied sources of competence frustration. Thus, our findings advanced understanding of the competence restorative process and helped clarify the dynamics between competition and human motivation.