Assessing the Credibility of Clinical Presentations Using Performance and Symptom Validity Tests: Current Trends and Future Directions

Abstract

This editorial article introduces a special issue of Psychology & Neuroscience dealing with performance and symptom validity testing (SVTs). We first discuss the importance of assessing the credibility of observed performance on cognitive tasks and of symptoms reported in questionnaires or clinical interviews, both in research and in clinical and forensic settings. We then briefly summarize the content of each article in this special issue and discuss their contribution to this topic. We conclude that practitioners have an increasing number of embedded performance validity tests (PVTs) at their disposal, so current research trends are focused on finding newer and better algorithms for integrating results from multiple PVTs. In contrast, there are significantly fewer SVTs available to practitioners, so researchers in this area currently seem to be focused on developing and validating both embedded and free-standing SVTs.