The Psych-AID Network was delighted to participate in the annual European Association of Psychology and Law (EAPL<\/a>) Conference 2026 in Bari, Italy. The EAPL2026<\/a> conference, hosted by the Universit\u00e0 degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro from 17th to 19th September, brought together researchers and practitioners from the fields of law and psychology to discuss topics including the assessment of asylum claims, bias in justice processes, miscarriages of justice, gender-based violence, the situation of sexual and gender minorities in the justice system, improving the protection of victims and persons in vulnerable situations and other relevant topics at the intersection of law and psychology. The conference featured pre-conference workshops, keynote addresses, oral presentations, symposia, and poster sessions. Researchers from Psych-AID actively participated in all sessions and presented their latest research work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Doctoral researchers Siyu Li and Obed Appiah attended the pre-conference workshops on two important topics. Prof. Henry Otgaar (Maastricht University and KU Leuven) and Carolina Duque, a PhD researcher at KU Leuven, organised a workshop entitled “From Protocol to Practice: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Forensic Child Interviewing”. The workshop explored cultural differences in implementing the NICHD Protocol in legal contexts. Prof. Otgaar described how child protection professionals in the Netherlands are trained to use the NICHD Protocol, while Carolina Duque presented how it is applied in Chile. Participants were also divided into groups to discuss how cultural factors may influence the Protocol, formulate appropriate open-ended questions, and conduct mock child interviews through role-playing exercises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second workshop, entitled “Assessing the Credibility of Clinical and Forensic Presentations: An Introduction to the Inventory of Problems\u201329 (IOP-29) and its Memory module (IOP-M)”, was led by Prof. Luciano Giromini (University of Turin). Prof. Giromini introduced participants to the theoretical foundations of malingering assessment and discussed the challenges associated with measuring instruments. He explained that recent developments seek to integrate Symptom Validity Tests (SVTs), which assess the credibility of self-reported symptoms, with Performance Validity Tests (PVTs), which evaluate the credibility of observed cognitive performance. He then presented the Inventory of Problems (IOP) instruments, developed by him and his collaborators to assess whether a person is exaggerating psychological symptoms in a clinical presentation. Participants had the opportunity to complete sample assessments and learn how the results are interpreted in clinical contexts.<\/p>\n\n\nPre-Conference Workshops<\/h3>\n\n\n\n