Nonverbal Medical Symptom Validity Test performance of elderly healthy adults and clinical neurology patients

Abstract

The study aimed to provide independent data on the specificity of the Nonverbal Medical Symptom Validity Test (NV-MSVT; Green, 2008), a new test that combines conventional decision making based on cutoffs with profile analyses in order to identify invalid test performance and to reduce false positive classifications. The results of 65 bona fide neurological patients (with 21 of them meeting Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders–Fourth Edition, DSM-IV, core criteria for dementia) were compared to 50 healthy volunteers. One patient was wrongly classified as malingering, resulting in a specificity of 98.5% for neurological patients and 100% for controls. A total of 13 patients with dementia (62%), 6 patients without dementia (14%), and 1 healthy participant exhibited a dementia profile in the NV-MSVT. While these results confirm the high specificity of the NV-MSVT for the classification insufficient effort, its sensitivity has to be verified by independent research data.

Keywords:

• Malingering
• Symptom validity testing
• Neuropsychological assessment
• Negative response bias
• Memory