Moral Reminders Do Not Reduce Symptom Over-Reporting Tendencies

Presenting the consequences of feigning: Does it diminish symptom overendorsement? An analog study

Feigning causes personal and societal consequences, in both civil and criminal context. We investigated whether presenting the consequences of feigning can diminish symptom endorsement in feigned Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). We randomly allocated non-native English speaking undergraduates (N = 145) to five conditions: 1) Truth tellers (n = 31), 2) Civil context feigners (n = 27), 3) Civil context warned feigners (n = 26), 4) Criminal context feigners (n = 29), and 5) Criminal context warned feigners (n = 32). All feigning groups received a vignette depicting a situation in which claiming PTSD would be beneficial. One vignette referred to the personal injury claim, whereas the second was about the aggravated assault charges. Additionally, one feigning group from each setting received information about the consequences of feigning (i.e., warned feigners). After receiving the instructions, all participants were administered the Self-Report Symptom Inventory (SRSI), a measure of symptom endorsement. Truth tellers endorsed fewer symptoms than all feigning groups, which mostly did not differ. Yet, criminal warned feigners (59%) were significantly less frequently detected on the SRSI as overreporters than other feigning groups (86.2%-89%). Hence, emphasizing the negative consequences of overreporting may diminish symptom endorsement, but only in high-stake situations. The implications and limitations (e.g., online measure administration) of this work are discussed.

Scores in Self-Report Questionnaires Assessing Adult ADHD Can Be Influenced by Negative Response Bias but Are Unrelated to Performance on Executive Function and Attention Tests

Self-report questionnaires are in widespread use in the assessment of adults with suspected attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Notwithstanding the high degree of validity, these questionnaires are considered to possess, their stand-alone use in assessment for adult ADHD may result in false-positive diagnoses due to the risk of negative response bias. Most of the self-report questionnaires in typical use are based on the diagnostic systems DSM-5 or ICD-10. From a neuropsychological point of view, however, testing of various executive function abilities and attentional performance is important in the assessment of adult ADHD. The present study (N = 211) found no evidence linking executive function (working memory and inhibitory processes) and attentional performance (processing speed) to the results of a self-report questionnaire, the ADHS-LE. The number of failures on the three symptom or performance validity tests (SVT/PVT) used provided the sole, and significant, explanation for the response behavior reported on the ADHS-LE. Of these three SVT/PVTs (the German version of the Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology, SIMS, the reliable digit span, and the standard deviation of simple reaction time), only the SIMS was found to be a significant predictor variable. In the clinical context of this study, 32.6% of subjects produced at least one invalid SVT/PVT result. The use of a more conservative criterion—failure on at least two of the three SVT/PVTs deemed to be feigning ADHD—reduced the proportion of participants generating invalid values to 5%.

Symptom and Performance Validity Assessment in European Countries: an Update

In 2013, a special issue of the Spanish journal Clínica y Salud published a review on symptom and performance validity assessment in European countries (Merten et al. in Clínica y Salud, 24(3), 129–138, 2013). At that time, developments were judged to be in their infancy in many countries, with major publication activities stemming from only four countries: Spain, The Netherlands, Great Britain, and Germany. As an introduction to a special issue of Psychological Injury and Law, this is an updated report of developments during the last 10 years. In that period of time, research activities have reached a level where it is difficult to follow all developments; some validity measures were newly developed, others were adapted for European languages, and validity assessment has found a much stronger place in real-world evaluation contexts. Next to an update from the four nations mentioned above, reports are now given from Austria, Italy, and Switzerland, too.

Flipping the Script: Measuring Both Performance Validity and Cognitive Ability with the Forced Choice Recognition Trial of the RCFT

In this study we attempted to replicate the classification accuracy of the newly introduced Forced Choice Recognition trial (FCR) of the Rey Complex Figure Test (RCFT) in a clinical sample. We administered the RCFT_FCR and the earlier Yes/No Recognition trial from the RCFT to 52 clinically referred patients as part of a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery and incentivized a separate control group of 83 university students to perform well on these measures. We then computed the classification accuracies of both measures against criterion performance validity tests (PVTs) and compared results between the two samples. At previously published validity cutoffs (≤16 & ≤17), the RCFT_FCR remained specific (.84-1.00) to psychometrically defined non-credible responding. Simultaneously, the RCFT_FCR was more sensitive to examinees' natural variability in visual-perceptual and verbal memory skills than the Yes/No Recognition trial. Even after being reduced to a seven-point scale (18-24) by the validity cutoffs, both RCFT recognition scores continued to provide clinically useful information on visual memory. This is the first study to validate the RCFT_FCR as a PVT in a clinical sample. Our data also support its use for measuring cognitive ability. Replication studies with more diverse samples and different criterion measures are still needed before large-scale clinical application of this scale.