Rasmus Rosenberg LarsenUniversity of Toronto | U of T · Forensic Science Program & Department of Philosophy
Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen
Doctor of Philosophy
My book "Psychopathy Unmasked: The Rise and Fall of a Dangerous Diagnosis" is scheduled to be released in spring 2025.
About
32
Publications
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Introduction
Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga, where he lectures in the Forensic Science Program and Department of Philosophy. He is particularly interested in the role of psychiatric disorders in forensic settings, and the epistemic status of forensic theories and methods. His research focus mainly on forensic epistemology and philosophy of science, however, with a current focus on psychology, psychopathology and value theory.
Additional affiliations
August 2011 - May 2017
Publications
Publications (32)
Advances in emotion and affective science have yet to translate routinely into psychiatric research and practice. This is unfortunate since emotion and affect are fundamental components of many psychiatric conditions. Rectifying this lack of interdisciplinary integration could thus be a potential avenue for improving psychiatric diagnosis and treat...
The psychiatric diagnosis of psychopathic personality – or psychopathy – signifies a patient stereotype with a callous lack of empathy and strong antisocial tendencies. Throughout the research record and psychiatric practices, diagnosed psychopaths have been predominantly seen as immune to psychiatric intervention and treatment, making the diagnosi...
The Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL; Hare, Neumann, & Mokros 2018) scales are among the most widely used forensic assessment tools. Their perceived utility rests partly on their ability to assess stable personality traits indicative of a lack of conscience, which then facilitates behavioral predictions useful in forensic decisions. In this systemat...
Questionable research practices are a well-recognized problem in psychology. Coding bias, or the tendency of review studies to disproportionately cite positive findings from original research, has received comparatively little attention. Coding bias is more likely to occur when original research, such as neuroimaging, includes large numbers of effe...
There have been renewed calls to use phenomenology in psychiatry to improve knowledge about causation, diagnostics, and treatment of mental health conditions. A phenomenological approach aims to elucidate the subjective experiences of mental health, which its advocates claim have been largely neglected by current diagnostic frameworks in psychiatry...
Psychopathy assessments are widely used in the legal system to inform decisions about sentencing, rehabilitation, etc. Recently, these assessments have become controversial as long-held beliefs about psychopathy are contested. One common claim that has yet to be scrutinized is the assumption that psychopathic persons lack empathy. This hypothesis h...
Theories have posited that psychopathy is caused by dysfunction in the medial frontal cortex, including ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC). Recent reviews have questioned the reproducibility of neuroimaging findings within this field. We conducted a systematic review to...
We demonstrate that many philosophers accept the following claim: When an aesthetic object is apprehended correctly, taking pleasure in said object is a reliable sign that the object is aesthetically successful. We undermine this position by showing that what grounds our pleasurable experience is opaque: In many cases, the experienced pleasure is a...
Recent contributions in moral philosophy have raised questions concerning the prevalent assumption that moral judgments are typologically discrete, and thereby distinct from ordinary and/or other types of judgments. This paper adds to this discourse, surveying how attempts at defining what makes moral judgments distinct have serious shortcomings, a...
In philosophy of aesthetics, scholars commonly express a commitment to the premise that there is a distinctive type of judgment that can be meaningfully labeled “aesthetic”, and that these judgments are distinctively different from other types of judgments. We argue that, within an Aristotelian framework, there is no clear avenue for meaningfully d...
The amount of neuroimaging evidence introduced in courts continues to increase. Meanwhile, neuroimaging research is in the midst of a reproducibility crisis, as many published findings appear to be false positives. The problem is mostly due to small sample sizes, lack of direct replications, and questionable research practices. There are concerns t...
Background & objectives:
Though it has been argued that courts should admit biogenetic evidence on psychopathy, no research to date has evaluated whether individuals with clinical psychopathy have consistent genetic correlates. The current study: 1) systematically reviewed all quantitative and molecular genetic studies of PCL-R psychopathy, and 2)...
Psychopathic personality disorder, or psychopathy, is a psychiatric diagnosis associated with callous personality traits and chronic antisocial behaviors. During the past 2 decades, psychopathy assessments have been routinely utilized to inform violence prediction, threat management, sentencing, parole, etc. However, recent empirical research has q...
Purpose
The purpose of this study was to survey practitioners’ use and perceptions of psychopathy assessments in Canadian forensic psychiatric settings. Psychopathy assessments are widely used in forensic settings to inform decisions about sentencing, placement, rehabilitation and parole. Recent empirical evidence suggests that the utility of psych...
We argue that there is significant evidence for reconsidering the possibility that moral judgment constitutes a distinctive category of judgment. We begin by reviewing evidence and arguments from neuroscience and philosophy that seem to indicate that a diversity of brain processes result in verdicts that we ordinarily consider “moral judgments”. We...
The domain of mental health is inherently complex, spanning across multiple disciplines, data types, descriptive levels, and approaches. This complexity has brought considerable challenges in terms of how to facilitate efficient knowledge discovery and integration across disciplines in the domain. The vocabulary and semantic frameworks in use acros...
[Book chapter with no abstract]
Psychopathy has been theorized as a disorder of emotion, which impairs moral judgments. However, these theories are increasingly being abandoned as empirical studies show that psychopaths seem to make proper moral judgments. In this contribution, these findings are reassessed, and it is argued that prevalent emotion-theories of psychopathy appear t...
Sentimentalist aesthetic theories, broadly construed, posit that emotions play a fundamental role in aesthetic experiences. Jesse Prinz has recently proposed a reductionistic version of sentimentalist aesthetics, suggesting that it is the discrete feeling of 'wonder' that makes an experience aesthetic. In this contribution, we draw on Prinz’s propo...
This letter addresses the editorial decision to publish the article, “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry” (Cofnas, 2020). Our letter points out several critical problems with Cofnas's article, which we believe should have either disqualified the manuscript upon submission or been addressed during the review pro...
The term psychopathy refers to a personality disorder associated with callous personality traits and antisocial behaviors. Throughout its research history, psychopathy has frequently been described as a peculiar form of moral blindness, engendering a narrative about a patient stereotype incapable of taking a genuine moral perspective, similar to a...
Mental health research faces a suite of unresolved challenges that have contributed to a stagnation of research efforts and treatment innovation. One such challenge is how to reliably and validly account for the subjective side of patient symptomatology, that is, the patient’s inner experiences or patient phenomenology. Providing a structured, stan...
Mental health research faces a suite of unresolved challenges that have contributed to a stagnation of research efforts and treatment innovation. One such challenge is how to reliably and validly account for the subjective side of patient symptomatology, that is, the patient’s inner experiences or patient phenomenology. Providing a structured, stan...
Recent debates in psychopathy studies have articulated concerns about false-positives in assessment and research sampling. These are pressing concerns for research progress, since scientific quality depends on sample quality, that is, if we wish to study psychopathy we must be certain that the individuals we study are, in fact, psychopaths. Thus, i...
We may correctly say that Søren Kierkegaard is one of the most influential Christian-religious thinkers of the modern era, but are we equally justified in categorizing his writings as foundationally religious? This paper challenges a prevailing exclusive-theological interpretation that contends that Kierkegaard principally writes from a Christian d...
Soren Kierkegaard is often considered to be one of the most vocal critics of German idealism. The present paper analyzes the philosophical similarity between Friedrich Schelling's early idealistic work and Kierkegaard's existential writings, endeavoring to display Schelling's epic 1809 publication Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Hu...
Questions
Question (1)
To my knowledge, only few surveys have been conducted that inquires about and/or quantifies the concrete use of the PCL-R by forensic practitioners (e.g., Singh et al., 2014; Sörman et al., 2016; etc.). I am interested in knowledge concerning: How often the PCL-R is used in correctional institutions? Or in court proceedings? Which type of forensic practitioners are its most frequent users? To what ends are the PCL-R used, for instance, is it for internal use or for parole dispositions?
Best wishes, Rasmus