PSYC 3850 Lecture : Reading 2

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 3850
• Professor: Caryl

Document Summary

Reading 2 - defining mental retardation: a matter of life or death y recently, the supreme court ruled against the execution of convicted murderers with mental retardation y the question of who has mental retardation? has been raised. Iq is being brought back to decide the fate of convicted murderers y y the court and many other associations have pointed out that high stake decisions never should be made on the basis of a single test score. The main question has been to what extent other criteria should be used to diagnose mental retardation y adaptive behaviour was introduced as a definitional component of mental retardation but there were two drawbacks: Divergent-convergent validity criterion it is impossible to have both. When both iq and adaptive behaviour are imposed as joint definitional criteria for mental retardation, the net effect is to narrow down drastically the number of person diagnosed with mental retardation y. The problem is how to include it.