MMPI-2 assessment of malingered emotional distress related to a workplace injury: a mixed group validation

In this study, we examined the capacity of MMPI-2 (Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 2001) validity indexes to identify malingered depression associated with a workplace injury. We compared 27 graduate students simulating depression with archival records of 33 inpatients diagnosed with major depressive disorder. We employed a mixed-group validation design to generate true positive rates (TPR) and false positive rates (FPR) for the various MMPI-2 validity scales [F, FB, F(p), FBS, F - K, Ds2] while we accounted for base rates of malingering in each sample. The Fake Bad scale (FBS) was the only validity measure that produced acceptable TPR and FPR or a significant correlation with malingering status.