Malingering on the Personality Assessment Inventory: identification of specific feigned disorders

Profile validity is a primary consideration in the clinical assessment of psychopathology. Several indicators of negative impression management have been developed for the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; Morey, 1991) that can both indicate its presence and help differentiate effortful negative distortion from distortion arising from cognitive sets associated with psychopathology. In this study, we tested a method designed to delineate the specific Clinical scales relevant for interpretation of deliberately feigned disorders. We used associations between the Negative Impression Management (NIM) scale and Clinical scales in the normative standardization sample to derive NIM predicted scale scores in a regression framework. We contrasted these predicted scores with observed scores on Clinical scales to yield NIM predicted discrepancies hypothesized to identify those Clinical scales most salient for the interpretation of negative distortion. We found this method to be effective in identifying particular distortion on the relevant scales for individuals attempting to feign 3 specific diagnoses (major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and schizophrenia).