The Other Side of Malingering: Supernormality

Abstract

Supernormality refers to the tendency to systematically deny the presence of common symptoms (e.g., intrusive thoughts). The current article describes the psychometric qualities of a 37-item self-report measure of supernormality (i.e., Supernormality Scale; SS). The SS was administered to nonclinical individuals (n=95), noncriminal psychiatric patients (n=28), nonpsychiatric delinquents (n=49), and a heterogeneous sample of forensic patients (n=59). Within the healthy control sample, some employees were instructed to feign supernormal behaviour, while others were asked to respond honestly to SS items. Findings indicate that the SS demonstrates adequate test-retest stability and internal consistency. In the forensic patient sample, elevated SS scores were significant related to denial of intrusive thoughts in a thought suppression paradigm. However, accuracy parameters for the SS (i.e., sensitivity and specificity) showed that there is room for improvement. Nevertheless, our findings indicate that the SS might be a useful research tool for measuring denial of common symptoms.

Mother Teresa Doesn't Help Here: Lack of Moral Priming Effects on Malingered Symptom Reports and What We Can Learn from it

“…As mentioned before, previous priming studies have shown that when primes become too obvious, they no longer fly under the radar of explicit memory and might lose their power to affect subsequent behaviour (Bargh & Chartrand, 2000). There might, however, be an additional complication, which is that intense and explicit moral primes may perhaps encourage supernormality (Cima, Merckelbach, Hollnack, Butt, Kremer, Schellbach-Matties et al, 2003). Supernormality, or faking good, is another type of response bias that may distort brain-behaviour relationships.…”

Thought suppression, dissociation, and context sensitivity

“…Perhaps then, participants exhibited a tendency to present themselves more favourably in the one-on-one situation in our laboratory than during the anonymous mass testing session. This tendency is coined supernormality by Cima, Merckelbach, Hollnack, Butt, Kremer, et al (2003). Our findings suggest that researchers using the DES are well-advised to reduce supernormality tendencies by stressing to participants that the data will be collected anonymously.…”

Placebo’s, verwachtingen en daderamnesie: twee gevalsstudies

“…De SS-R is zodoende een instrument om 'faking good' oftewel supernormaliteit in kaart te brengen (Cima, 2003;Cima et al, 2003a;Cima, Van Bergen, & Cremer, ingediend voor publicatie). Bij 'faking good' ontkent de patie¨nt symptomen, die bij gezonde mensen wel voorkomen.…”

“…Dat is in deze groep van daders niet ongebruikelijk. Over het algemeen scoren patie¨nten in een forensische instelling beneden de afkapgrens van de SS-R (Cima et al, 2003a). Dat heeft ermee te maken dat deze patie¨nten vaak zo'n gezond mogelijke indruk willen maken, opdat ze de kliniek zo snel mogelijk kunnen verlaten.…”