Symptom and Performance Validity Assessment in European Countries: an Update

Abstract

In 2013, a special issue of the Spanish journal Clínica y Salud published a review on symptom and performance validity assessment in European countries (Merten et al. in Clínica y Salud, 24(3), 129-138, 2013). At that time, developments were judged to be in their infancy in many countries, with major publication activities stemming from only four countries: Spain, The Netherlands, Great Britain, and Germany. As an introduction to a special issue of Psychological Injury and Law, this is an updated report of developments during the last 10 years. In that period of time, research activities have reached a level where it is difficult to follow all developments; some validity measures were newly developed, others were adapted for European languages, and validity assessment has found a much stronger place in real-world evaluation contexts. Next to an update from the four nations mentioned above, reports are now given from Austria, Italy, and Switzerland, too.

Prevalence Estimates of Symptom Feigning and Malingering in Spain

“…Given that the use of subjective clinical judgment is not an efficient method for symptom validity assessment (Sweet et al, 2021 ), it is possible that experts who rely on its use detect fewer cases, which would influence their perception of the occurrence of feigning and cause them to underestimate it. In addition to the high use of SVTs, the erroneous belief has been identified in Spain that SIMS is a “malingering test” and that a positive result is equivalent to malingering detection (Merten et al, 2013 , 2021 ). This could increase the number of detected cases and alter the psychologist perception of the occurrence of the event, in this case overestimating it.…”

“…At present, there are more open questions than answers, and there is still a need for such an effort, especially at the research level. As stated in a recent update of the 2013 review (Merten et al, 2021 ), there were no guidelines for validity testing in Spain, a problem that still persists. Also, more psychometric instruments need to be validated, and efforts should be made to provide a more complete and comprehensive education on the subject, including the use of current terminology and knowledge about the most recent developments.…”

Validity of the Norwegian Version of Inventory of Problems–29 (IoP-29): A simulation study with experimental feigning of depression and a nonclinical control group.

“…Tests need to be adapted to language and culture by using strict methodological procedures to achieve fairness in testing. A recent overview of the situation in Europe pointed to a lack of translations and validation studies, affecting both local languages and languages of an increasing population of immigrants (Merten et al, 2022).…”

“…The low awareness of malingering as a phenomenon in clinical practice, especially in forensic psychiatric evaluations, has been pointed out among European clinicians (Merten et al, 2022). While up-to-date estimates of prevalence rates are not available for Norway, research in the field places the prevalence as high as 30%, with averages of around 15% (Greve et al, 2009; McDermott et al, 2013; Rumschik & Appel, 2019; Young, 2015).…”

The Inventory of Problems–29 (IOP-29): A systematic review and bivariate diagnostic test accuracy meta-analysis.

“…Current guidelines recommend administering both performance validity tests (PVTs) and symptom validity tests (SVTs) to assess the credibility of presented psychological problems (Merten et al, 2021(Merten et al, , 2022Sherman et al, 2020;Sweet et al, 2021). The main purpose of PVTs is to assess excessively poor performance on cognitive tests (underperforming on cognitive tasks), which is often done with the Reliable Digit Span of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (e.g., Babikian et al, 2006), the Test of Memory Malingering (Tombaugh, 1996), and/or other similar tools.…”