Statement
Hereby the Report and Judgement of the Jury of the Koningsheide Award 2017; price giving on March 2nd, 2017, Tilburg Law School, Tilburg, the Netherlands.
The Jury is chaired by prof. em. Theo Doreleijers MD PhD, forensic child- and adolescent psychiatrist; members prof. Robbert Jan Verkes MD PhD, biological and forensic psychiatrist, and prof. em. Hjalmar van Marle MD PhD, forensic psychiatrist (secretary).
This award is meant as an encouragement for researchers in forensic psychiatry, by rewarding the best publication in this field, whether their research may concern a case study, a review, an empirical study, treatment program or book. As the foundation Koningsheide has as its aim to further innovative scientific research in chronic psychiatric patients as a first support to bring about a new impetus, the practical applicability in the field of forensic psychiatry has been an important intellectual framework.
Forensic psychiatry as a practical and scientific field assembles general psychiatry, legislation and litigation and the social feeling of safety in the community. Scientific research in forensic psychiatry may combine these basic conditions all together while studying forensic diagnostics, treatment,accountability and social security. For its trustworthiness, this research has to be accessible to scientific scrutiny, reproducibility and testability, quantitative or qualitative formulated.
The Jury, the above mentioned values in mind, has formulated five critical performance indicators as criteria for qualification for the Koningsheide Award:
- Scientific quality
- Societal relevance
- Readability
- Innovative characteristics
- Youthfulness/enthusiasm of the authors.
These criteria have been rated on a 1-2- 3-scale (no, a bit, full presence). All members of the jury have examined all (almost 50) publications, they have rated them independently and then reported to the Chair.
To compensate for possible conflicts of interest by a member of the jury, who is also co-author, a separate calculation has been made only by the other two members.
The Jury was pleasantly surprised by the high quality of the submissions. The Award goes to the article with the highest score, part of a PhD-thesis to be, titled,
'Neural connectivity during reward expectation dissociates psychopathic criminals from non-criminal individuals with high impulsive/antisocial psychopathic traits', of Dirk E.M. Geurts MD, Donders Institute for the Brain, Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands), with his co-workers, published in the scientific journal 'Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2016, 1326 - 1334.
This publication is also a good example of the synergy of multicentre research performed by different institutes with various connections to the forensic patient, namely two specialized neuro-scientific institutes (one from the United Kingdom), academic psychiatry and the clinical practice of a Dutch forensic psychiatric hospital. The jury likes to promote this kind of multicentre translational approach.
The Jury.