The Detection of Malingered Psychopathology and Cognitive Deficits: Employing the Fake Bad Scale and the Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices

The feigning of cognitive deficits and the feigning of psychopathology are generally regarded as two separate domains of malingering. Malingering detection techniques have usually been developed and applied with this distinction in mind. This study is one of the first to integrate malingering detection approaches across the cognitive and psychological domains. Three groups of Australian university students (N = 102) completed Lees-Haley, English and Glenn's (1991) Fake Bad Scale (FBS) and Raven's (1989) Standard Progressive Matrices (RSPM). For both instruments, the first group was instructed to respond accurately and truthfully to all items, the second group to fake cognitive deficits and the third group to fake psychopathology. As predicted, the FBS was effective when used alone, with an overall sensitivity of 81%, and no false positives. The FBS was equally sensitive to the malingering of cognitive deficits and psychopathology; a similar pattern of results was obtained for two subtests of the RSPM. It was concluded that malingerers tend not to discriminate between cognitive and psychological test instruments when feigning either type of symptom.