About

John Edens is a Professor at Texas A&M University College of Arts and Sciences within the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences. His research broadly spans the interaction between psychology and the legal system, often referred to as forensic psychology. His work primarily addresses the utility of psychological data, such as tests and evaluation procedures, to inform important mental health and legal questions within the criminal justice system. This includes violence risk assessment, adjudicative competence, and personality assessment in correctional settings. Professor Edens's research focuses on the development and improvement of psychological assessment techniques and instruments, with particular emphasis on personality measurement in forensic and correctional contexts. He has a specific interest in the construct of psychopathy and its impact on forensic and correctional decision-making worldwide. His work investigates the assessment and measurement of psychopathic traits, their role in evaluating various populations such as children and minorities, and the potential stigmatizing effects of the label 'psychopath.' Additionally, he conducts research on human aggression, especially related to assessing and managing violence risk, emphasizing the clinical utility of various violence risk factors in identifying individuals most or least at risk for engaging in aggressive behavior.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Medicine
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Social psychology
• Medical emergency
• Law
• Psychiatry
• Engineering
• Criminology
• Clinical psychology
• Applied psychology
• Cognitive psychology

Selected publications

• A nondogmatic approach to boldness: Reply to Athar et al. (2026).

  Psychological Assessment · 2026-03-23

  articleSenior author

  Athar et al. (see record 2027-45295-001) offer a critique of the Psychopathic Boldness Scale (see record 2025-96918-001), highlighting what they argue are both conceptual and empirical limitations of this new operationalization of the triarchic model's construct of boldness. In this reply, we demonstrate that their theoretical claims are based on a mischaracterization of the triarchic model, in which they purport that boldness should be orthogonal to the triarchic construct of meanness. We also provide additional empirical analyses suggesting that Athar et al. are incorrect in their characterization of the extent to which the correlates of the Psychopathic Boldness Scale initially described by Marcus et al. (2025) suggest that it is a de facto operationalization of meanness (rather than boldness). We conclude with suggestions for additional research with the Psychopathic Boldness Scale that would better inform our understanding of the nomological network of this new scale, such as examining correlations with constructs associated with narcissism and with psychophysiological measures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Detection of Response Inconsistency Procedure

  PsycTESTS Dataset · 2025-01-01

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Development of an Inconsistent Responding Scale for the Big Five Inventory-2

  Journal of Personality Assessment · 2024-10-21

  article

  = 1,461) and then computed a total score by summing the absolute differences of these item pairs. This scale, the Detection of Response Inconsistency Procedure (DRIP), differentiated randomly generated and genuine data and generally correlated as expected with personality domains and other inconsistent responding scales across samples. The DRIP also incrementally predicted random data beyond a composite of items with exceptionally high or low base rates of endorsement from the Comprehensive Infrequency/Frequency Item Repository. We provide recommendations for DRIP cut scores that can detect careless responding while balancing sensitivity and specificity.

  PublisherDOI

• Personality assessment inventory (PAI) in forensic and correctional settings: A comprehensive review

  Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine · 2024-03-05 · 10 citations

  reviewOpen access

  As Forensic Psychology continues to expand as an independent field, professionals regularly resort to psychological assessment tools to assess people involved within the justice system. The Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) is a 344-item, self-report inventory that aims to provide meaningful information for diagnosis and clinical decision-making, specifically relating to psychopathology, personality, and psychosocial environment. Its applicability in forensic settings has been increasingly recognized on account of its benefits in comparison to other self-report inventories (e.g., MMPI-2, MCMI-III), since it includes scales that are relevant to forensic settings (e.g., violence risk levels, psychopathy, substance abuse), and the existence of profile distortion indicators is useful when dealing with highly defensive and/or malingering populations. The goal of this paper is to conduct a thorough review of the PAI's utility in forensic settings, by focusing on the relevant forensic constructs assessed by the PAI (e.g., personality disorders, psychosis, substance abuse, aggression, recidivism risk, and response distortion), as well as its application to offender and inmate populations, intimate partner violence contexts, family law cases, and forensic professionals. Overall, the PAI continues to gather international recognition and its relevance and usefulness in forensic settings is generally accepted and acknowledged.

  PublisherDOI

• HEXACO Brief Response Inconsistency Evaluation Scale

  PsycTESTS Dataset · 2023-01-01

  datasetSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Psychopathic Traits in a Swedish Court-Ordered Forensic Sample: Preferential Associations of Boldness, Meanness, and Disinhibition

  International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology · 2023-08-20

  articleOpen access

  The construct validity of the triarchic psychopathy model has yet to be evaluated in the Swedish forensic psychiatric context. We examined associations between the three phenotypic constructs of the triarchic model of psychopathy (i.e., boldness, meanness, disinhibition), self-assessed empathy and anxiety, and clinical variables in 91 individuals undergoing pretrial forensic psychiatric evaluation in Sweden. Participants completed the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure (TriPM) and self-report measures of empathy and anxiety. Clinical variables, including psychiatric diagnoses and criminal behavior, were collected from the forensic psychiatric evaluations (FPE). All three subscales of the TriPM displayed significant and predominantly anticipated correlations with empathy and trait anxiety measures. TriPM Disinhibition was the only subscale with significant associations with the clinical variables collected from the FPEs. The results provide evidence for the reliability and construct validity of the Swedish translation of the TriPM in a pretrial forensic setting.

  PublisherDOI

• Forensic Psychology

  2023-08-21

  book-chapterSenior author

  A forensic psychologist and clinical psychologists contribute to this chapter, examining claims such as these: 1) All crime scene investigation techniques are objective and infallible and 2) forensic psychological testimony is objective and unbiased. The chapter also critiques fringe theories about psychopathy, including headlines about psychopathy in the media.

  PublisherDOI

• Triarchic psychopathy and affective picture processing: An event-related potential study

  Biological Psychology · 2023-07-08 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Development of an Inconsistent Responding Scale for the HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised

  Assessment · 2023-03-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Inconsistent or careless responding is a significant threat to the validity of self-reported personality data. Using archival samples of undergraduate and community participants, we developed an inconsistent responding scale using items that appear on both the 60- and 100-item versions of the HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised-two widely used measures of the HEXACO model of personality trait structure. We identified pairs of correlated HEXACO items in Sample 1 and created a total inconsistent responding score by summing absolute differences between each item pair. The Brief Response Inconsistency Evaluation (BRIE) for the HEXACO effectively differentiated between genuine and randomly generated responses across samples. The BRIE also correlated as expected with other measures of careless responding and relevant personality traits (e.g., conscientiousness). Tentative cut scores for the BRIE that appear to provide a reasonable balance between sensitivity and specificity in Sample 1 were investigated. Future research should examine the BRIE with different populations and translations of the HEXACO inventories and further investigate the effectiveness of the recommended cut scores.

  PublisherDOI

• Dark triad traits are associated with a weaker morally-good true self bias in self-perceptions

  Self and Identity · 2023-01-23 · 8 citations

  article

  We examined whether Dark Triad (DT) traits moderate people’s tendency to associate moral traits with their true self. We hypothesized that people high in DT traits would show a weaker tendency to view moral (vs. immoral) characteristics as central to their identity. Undergraduate participants (N = 345) rated the perceived identity centrality of positive/negative traits in domains of morality/competence, and completed measures of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. Positive moral (vs. immoral and positive competence) traits were seen as more identity central overall, but this effect was weaker among participants high in DT traits. Further, all DT traits negatively (positively) predicted the identity centrality of moral (immoral) traits. These findings extend work on true self-perceptions and moral identity in the Dark Triad.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01MH081069

  NIH · $827k · 2012

Frequent coauthors

• Norman G. Poythress

  63 shared

• Kevin S. Douglas

  41 shared

• Shannon Toney Smith

  FACE Foundation

  41 shared

• Scott O. Lilienfeld

  37 shared

• Jennifer L. Skeem

  29 shared

• Shannon E. Kelley

  William James College

  25 shared

• Jennifer Cox

  University of Alabama

  21 shared

• Jared R. Ruchensky

  19 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology

  Texas A&M University

Awards & honors

• APS Fellow