Identification of malingered head injury on the Halstead-Reitan battery

Heaton et al. (1978) demonstrated that the performance of malingerers and actual head trauma patients could be distinguished on the HRB by discriminant analysis. The present study replicated Heaton et al.'s methodology on a larger sample to provide a more stable function for discriminating simulated and real head trauma. Malingerers (n = 80) were instructed to fake severe deficits without being obvious. Patients (n = 80) had documented trauma and were not litigating for compensation. Groups were matched on age, gender, and overall Impairment Index to permit comparisons between patterns of performance. A crossvalidated step-wise discriminant function correctly identified 88.75% of the groups, with 83.8% true positives and 93.8% true negatives. This function was applied to several published data sets. Both malingerer and patient groups were accurately identified in Heaton et al. (1978) and Trueblood and Schmidt (1993). Faust et al.'s (1988) adolescent malingerer and the malingered performance of three litigating patients published by Cullum et al. (1991), were also correctly classified.