Detecting Fake-Bad MMPI-A Profiles

Ruling out feigned crime-related amnesia? A response to Acklin (2022)

In a recent paper, Acklin discussed a case of possible amnesia for a murder in terms of neurobiology, psychoanalysis, and personality assessment. Acklin accepted the defendant's claim of amnesia for the crime as genuine. The considerable literature that takes a skeptical view of crime-related amnesia was not cited, and the possibility of feigning or malingering was "ruled out" with a single sentence that does not withstand scrutiny. A review of the literature on feigned amnesia suggests that it may not be possible to rule out malingering even if the best available tools are used: There has been minimal investigation of most validity tests and estimates of base rates of feigned amnesia for a crime vary widely and make estimates of Negative Predictor Power highly unreliable. Although one cannot know from the information presented if Acklin's defendant legitimately experienced amnesia, feigning could not be ruled out using an interview and the test data cited by Acklin. I call for a moratorium on publication of further articles on crime specific amnesia that do not conscientiously examine other potential explanations and do not use current best practices for assessing negative response bias.

Exploring Children's Induced Defensiveness to the Tell Me a Story Test (TEMAS)

This study examined the effect of inducing a defensive attitude (fake good) in children on their responses to the Tell Me a Story test (TEMAS; Costantino, Malgady, & Rogler, 1988 ). Different story elicitation procedures were employed to explore their efficacy for inducing a defensive response style in children. Eighty-four Italian children aged 8 to 10 years old completed the TEMAS and the L scale of the Behavioral Assessment Scale for Children-2 (BASC-2; Reynolds & Kamphaus, 2004 ), which were used to detect the adoption of a defensive attitude. Children completed the tests under 1 of 3 conditions: (a) honest condition, (b) fake good with verbal instructions, and (c) fake good with verbal instructions and visual stimuli illustrating what was verbally explained. Using simultaneous verbal instructions and visual stimuli facilitated children's understanding of the researcher's instructions compared to using verbal stimuli alone. Results showed that children instructed to fake good used less time to tell stories and tended to modify the simpler and more face valid aspects of their stories. Still, 29 out of 47 children failed to fake good on the BASC-2 L scale. More complex TEMAS variables showed no significant difference between story elicitation conditions.

The Relationship Between the Self-Report BASC-2 Validity Indicators and Performance Validity Test Failure After Pediatric Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

In adult populations, research on methodologies to identify noncredible performance and exaggerated symptoms during neuropsychological evaluations has grown exponentially in the past two decades. Far less work has focused on methods appropriate for children. Although several recent studies have used stand-alone performance validity tests with younger populations, a near absence of pediatric work has investigated other indices to identify response bias. The present study examined the relationship between the validity scales from the self-report Behavior Assessment System for Children, Second Edition (BASC-2) and performance on the Medical Symptom Validity Test (MSVT), a stand-alone performance validity test. The sample consisted of 274 clinically referred patients with mild traumatic brain injuries aged 8 through 17 years. Fifty patients failed the MSVT based on actuarial criteria. The majority of these patients (92%) provided valid self-report BASC-2 profiles, with only three patients (6%) producing an invalid profile due to an elevated F index. Analysis of valid/invalid self-report BASC-2 profiles and MSVT pass/fail did not reveal a significant relationship ( p = 0.471, two-tailed Fisher’s exact test). These findings suggest that performance validity tests like the MSVT provide substantively different information about the validity of a neuropsychological profile than that provided by the self-report validity scales of the BASC-2.

Influence of history of brain disease or brain trauma on psychopathological abnormality in young male in Korea : analysis of multiphasic personal inventory test

OBJECTIVE

The purpose of this study is to confirm whether brain disease or brain trauma actually affect psychopathology in young male group in Korea.

METHODS

The authors manually reviewed the result of Korean military multiphasic personal inventory (KMPI) in the examination of conscription in Korea from January 2008 to May 2010. There were total 237 young males in this review. Normal volunteers group (n=150) was composed of those who do not have history of brain disease or brain trauma. Brain disease group (n=33) was consisted of those with history of brain disease. Brain trauma group (n=54) was consisted of those with history of brain trauma. The results of KMPI in each group were compared.

RESULTS

Abnormal results of KMPI were found in both brain disease and trauma groups. In the brain disease group, higher tendencies of faking bad response, anxiety, depression, somatization, personality disorder, schizophrenic and paranoid psychopathy was observed and compared to the normal volunteers group. In the brain trauma group, higher tendencies of faking-good, depression, somatization and personality disorder was observed and compared to the normal volunteers group.

CONCLUSION

Young male with history of brain disease or brain trauma may have higher tendencies to have abnormal results of multiphasic personal inventory test compared to young male without history of brain disease or brain trauma, suggesting that damaged brain may cause psychopathology in young male group in Korea.

Malingering in children: fibs and faking

Research has established that children can make efforts to deceive others and that malingering or underperformance in psychiatric and psychological evaluations is common. Clinicians often resist the idea that children can successfully fake mental disorders and formal assessment for malingering is rare in clinical practice. The author suggests that screening tests be performed during the initial evaluation of all children to identify deceptive behavior. Children who behave in a suspect fashion and children who have known motivations to present as more pathologic than they are should be formally assessed with psychological techniques to rule out the presence of malingering.

A review of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent (MMPI-A) and the Millon Adolescent Clinical Inventory (MACI) with an emphasis on juvenile justice samples

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent (MMPI-A) and Millon Adolescent Clinical Inventory (MACI) are frequently used objective personality self-report measures. Given their widespread use, the purpose of the current study was to examine and compare the literature base for the two instruments. A comprehensive review of the literature was conducted between the years 1992 and 2007 using the PsycINFO Database. Results indicate the publication of 277 articles, books, book chapters, monographs, and dissertation abstracts on the MMPI-A. This was compared with the results of a comparable search for the MACI, which yielded 84 citations. The literature was further explored by determining the content of the topic areas addressed for both instruments. A particular focus was placed on the utility of the instruments with juvenile justice populations; scale means, standard deviations, and effect sizes calculated from this literature were examined. Results indicate that the use of the MMPI-A is supported by a substantial literature and a growing research base is also available for the MACI. Both instruments appear to provide useful results in juvenile justice settings.

Identifying faking bad on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent with Mexican adolescents

This study examined the extent to which the validity scales of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent identified Mexican adolescents who were instructed to fake bad. Validity scales data were used to differentiate between nonclinical adolescents instructed to fake bad and both clinical and nonclinical adolescents who received standard instructions. Participants were 59 male and 87 female Mexican high school students and 59 male and 87 female Mexican adolescents from clinical settings. This is the first study onfaking with adolescents in Mexico. The F, Fl, and F2 Scales and the F-K index discriminated adequately between the three different groups. Results were similar to those previously reportedfor adults and adolescents in Mexico and the United States. High positive and negative predictive powers and overall hit rates were obtained in this study. Higher cut scores were needed to discriminate between the groups of girls than between the groups of boys.

Development of an Infrequency-Psychopathology scale for the MMPI-A: the Fp-A Scale

This article describes the development and initial validation of the Infrequency-Psychopathology scale, Fp-A, for the MMPI-A (Butcher et al., 1992). The scale parallels the Infrequency-Psychopathology scale, F(p), that has been developed for the MMPI-2 (Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989). Results demonstrated that the 40-item Fp-A scale is superior to the F scale at discriminating between faking-bad and accurate reports of psychopathology, although the improvement over F was modest, particularly when compared to the improvement found for the F(p) scale. The difference seemed to reflect the superiority of the MMPI-A F scale to the MMPI-2 F scale. Even so, the findings suggest that the identification of overreporting on the MMPI-A could potentially be enhanced by using Fp-A as an adjunct to the F scale.

Performance of the Personality Inventory for Youth validity scales

Response sets as well as cognitive and academic deficits compromise the validity of child and adolescent self-report of emotional adjustment. Three studies using clinical and asymptomatic samples of 4th to 12th grade students detail applications of the four validity scales of the Personality Inventory for Youth (PIY), namely, (a) Validity (VAL) a scale of six highly improbable statements, (b) Inconsistency (INC) consisting of pairs of highly correlated statements, (c) Dissimulation (FB) constructed of statements that were infrequent and characteristic of intentional distortion, and (d) Defensiveness (DEF) an extension of the Lie scale of the parent-report Personality Inventory for Children. The effects of minimizing, malingering, and random response sets on the PIY validity scales are reported. The importance of such validity scales derived from child and adolescent response is discussed.

MMPI-A profiles of Hispanic adolescents

A study was conducted to compare validity, clinical, content, and supplementary scale scores of Hispanic adolescents to normative data on the MMPI-A. Volunteers, 30 boys, 17 girls, were Hispanic adolescents, aged 14 to 18 years from school and after-school settings. Analysis indicated elevated T score means on F1 (66), F2 (68), F (68), L (61), Hs (61), D (63), Sc (62), A-hea (63), A-biz (63), A-lse (61), A-las (60), A-sch (61), and IMM (61) scales for boys. Scores for low aspirations, low self-esteem, immaturity, and school problems were all interrelated. For girls, scores on no scales were elevated, but on several scales mean T scores, Hs, Hy, Ma, Si, A-anx, A-obs, A-hea, A-ang, A-las, MAC-R, and ACK, were below average. This suggests the MMPI-A may underpathologize for girls. Consistent with previous findings, the boys scored higher on the Immaturity Scale than the girls. It was speculated that the boys' dislike for school and low aspirations were related to the lower education and employment of their fathers compared to those for the normative sample. The A-las, A-sch, and IMM scales may prove to be useful in identifying adolescent boys "at-risk" for dropping out of school, if replication with much larger samples confirms present findings.

Comparison of scores on the MMPI-A and MMPI-2 for young adults

Male college students' profiles look more pathological on the adult version of the MMPI than on the adolescent version. In the present study, men showed elevated scores on the F, Pa, and Sc scales on the MMPI-2. In contrast, women's profiles were more normal on the adult version. When designing the MMPI-A, the authors attempted to maintain correspondence with the original MMPI and the MMPI-2 so the scales could be interpreted similarly. This study compared scores on the MMPI-A and MMPI-2 by administering both tests to the same subjects (N = 43; 19 men and 24 women). Validity and standard scale scores were compared using Pearson product-moment correlations (r), T-score means and standard deviations, and average profiles. Codetype comparisons were also made. In general, MMPI-A and MMPI-2 codetype analyses did not agree. The codetype approach is not recommended for interpretation of the MMPI-A. The finding that young college men show elevated scores on MMPI-2 scales is consistent with previous research and suggests that the MMPI-A may be a useful tool for 18-yr.-old men.