This investigation sought to determine whether individuals high on psychopathic traits are better able than those low on such traits to avoid detection when feigning psychopathology in the context of a forensic psychological evaluation. Study 1 tested whether individuals high on psychopathy were better able than those low on psychopathy to avoid detection by the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory 2-Restructured Form's (MMPI-2-RF; Ben-Porath, Y. S., & Tellegen, A., 2008, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Restructured Form: Manual for administration, scoring and interpretation, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.) overreporting (F-r, Fp-r) and underreporting (L-r and K-r) validity scales, when undergraduate students were asked to feign good, feign bad, or respond honestly. Study 2 aimed to replicate and extend the overreporting (F-r and Fp-r) analyses in a forensic pretrial sample, in which individuals were classified as malingering or not malingering using the Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms (SIRS; Rogers, R., Bagby, R. M., & Dickens, S. E., 1992, Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms. Tampa, FL, Psychological Assessment Resources.). Combined results indicated that psychopathy did not affect the utility of the MMPI-2-RF validity scales in detecting overreporting. The underreporting analyses indicated that psychopathy did not affect the utility of L-r; however, callous-aggressive (or "meanness") psychopathy traits moderated the utility of K-r in detecting those feigning psychological adjustment, such that K-r was better able to detect individuals high on, rather than low on, psychopathy when underreporting. These results are promising in terms of evidence that individuals high on psychopathic traits are not any better than individuals low on these traits in feigning during psychological evaluations.

Individuals who are motivated to feign psychological problems to achieve a desired outcome (e.g., insanity defense) may overreport symptoms of psychopathology, with type of pathology being dependent on the setting. In the current investigation, we examined the utility of the overreporting validity scales (infrequent responses [F-r], infrequent psychopathology responses [F P -r], infrequent somatic responses [Fs], and symptom validity [FBS-r]) on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2-Restructured Form (Ben-Porath and Tellegen 2008) to detect research participants instructed to simulate one of three mental disorders: major depressive disorder (MDD), schizophrenia (SCH), or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The restructured clinical (RC) and overreporting validity scale scores of bona fide psychiatric patients with a primary diagnosis of either MDD, SCH, or PTSD were compared to two groups of simulators-naïve (i.e., undergraduate students with no training in mental disorders) and sophisticated (i.e., individuals with advanced training in psychopathology or personal experience with the disorder asked to overreport symptoms). Examination of the RC Scale profiles revealed that the sophisticated simulators produced symptom profiles more similar to the profiles of the psychiatric patients than did the naïve simulators. For the overreporting validity scales, the sophisticated simulators were less likely to be detected as feigning compared to the naïve simulators; overall, the validity scales were able to distinguish patients from simulators and accurately classify most of the simulators regardless of their level of "symptom" sophistication. Examination and comparison of the validity scales revealed that across disorders and level of research participant symptom sophistication, the F P -r scale best differentiated simulators from patients.

In this investigation, we examined the validity of Levenson's Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (LSRP; Levenson, Kiehl, & Fitzpatrick, 1995) in a sample of undergraduate students (n = 403). Utilizing a step-down hierarchical multiple regression procedure (e.g., Arbisi, Ben-Porath, & McNulty, 2002), we used LSRP scores to predict psychopathic personality traits to determine the presence of gender-moderated test bias. Results indicate similar correlational magnitudes for men and women. However, systematic over- and underprediction of scores (i.e., differential intercepts) was found for external criteria measuring key affective (i.e., low empathy) and behavioral (i.e., aggression, antisocial behavior) components of the psychopathic personality, although these effects were generally small.

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