Factitious responding and malingered memory disorder

Abstract

The past decade has seen a dramatic increase in the study of false responding on neuropsychological tests (Sweet, King, Malina, Bergman, & Simmons, 2002). This study began as the examination of malingering. It now includes new constructs and terminology: feigned impairment, poor effort, deceptive performance, pseudoabnormalities, symptom exaggeration, fake bad, symptom fabrication, malingered neurocognitive dysfunction, noncredible cognitive performance, response bias, suboptimal performance and a number of other terms. There has also been the introduction of new methods. These include new tests (Green, Iverson, & Allen, 1999; Tombaugh, 1997), the examination of constructs other than memory, such as sensory and motor abilities (Suhr & Barrash, 2007), and new ways of analyzing the results of conventional neuropsychological tests (Iverson, Slick, & Franzen, 2000; Larrabee, 2003). Another general change has been the tremendous increase in dialog about malingering. It is now one of the most popular topics at conferences and most of the commentary papers in clinical neuropsychology journals focus on malingering (Lees-Haley & Fox, 2004). This chapter will review some of this history, new symptom validity assessment that relies on memory, a general model for evaluating new malingering assessment approaches and a general plan for future studies.