The Call for Aid (Cry for Help) in Psychological Injury and Law: Reinterpretation, Mechanisms, and a Call for Research

Interpreting symptom validity test fails in forensic disability and related assessments: When the cry for help for one fail makes sense

Dandachi-FitzGerald et al. (2022), published the article "Cry for help as a root cause of poor symptom validity: A critical note," in Applied Neuropsychology: Adult [Advance Online], arguing that the cry for help in forensic disability and related assessments is not a valid interpretation for poor symptom validity test results. This rebuttal contests the criticisms of the use of the cry for help in this context, as presented in Young (2019); "The Cry for help in a psychological injury and law: Concepts and review" that appeared in Psychological Injury and Law, Vol. 12, pp. 225-237. It calls for more programmatic research, for example, based on the cry for help questionnaire suggested by the author. In particular, it indicates, for example, that one SVT test failure in a test battery constitutes an assessment result that could allow for attributing the cry for help, everything else being equal. It suggests that the adaptational theory explains the cry for help as much as malingering. It suggests practice and court recommendations that will allow better rebuttals of unethical assessors who overuse/misuse/abuse the cry for help interpretation of poor symptom validity test results in forensic disability and related assessments.

Assessing Negative Response Bias Using Self-Report Measures: New Articles, New Issues

In psychological injury and related forensic evaluations, two types of tests are commonly used to assess Negative Response Bias (NRB): Symptom Validity Tests (SVTs) and Performance Validity Tests (PVTs). SVTs assess the credibility of self-reported symptoms, whereas PVTs assess the credibility of observed performance on cognitive tasks. Compared to the large and ever-growing number of published PVTs, there are still relatively few validated self-report SVTs available to professionals for assessing symptom validity. In addition, while several studies have examined how to combine and integrate the results of multiple independent PVTs, there are few studies to date that have addressed the combination and integration of information obtained from multiple self-report SVTs. The Special Issue of Psychological Injury and Law introduced in this article aims to help fill these gaps in the literature by providing readers with detailed information about the convergent and incremental validity, strengths and weaknesses, and applicability of a number of selected measures of NRB under different conditions and in different assessment contexts. Each of the articles in this Special Issue focuses on a particular self-report SVT or set of SVTs and summarizes their conditions of use, strengths, weaknesses, and possible cut scores and relative hit rates. Here, we review the psychometric properties of the 19 selected SVTs and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. In addition, we make tentative proposals for the field to consider regarding the number of SVTs to be used in an assessment, the number of SVT failures required to invalidate test results, and the issue of redundancy when selecting multiple SVTs for an assessment.