Informed consent and neuropsychological assessment: Ethical considerations and proposed guidelines

The rationale for obtaining informed consent from patients contains a number of legal, ethical, and moral arguments that are well entrenched in the medical community but which have been embraced only recently by psychologists. The current Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (1992) elucidate informed consent guidelines for treatment and research, but do not provide the same degree of clarity concerning informed consent for clinical assessment. The purpose of this paper is to open a dialogue about the use of informed consent in neuropsychological assessment and to provide proposed recommendations for obtaining informed consent from patients receiving neuropsychological evaluations.