Detection of faking on the Halstead-Reitan neuropsychological test battery

Administered the Halstead-Reitan neuropsychological test battery to a heterogeneous sample of 52 brain-impaired patients and 202 non-impaired college and community volunteers. The volunteers were assigned randomly to either the control group or to one of four faking groups, which differed only in terms of type of brain damage Ss were to fake. The Right and Left groups were told to fake unilateral damage to only one hemisphere, the Diffuse group was told to fake damage to both hemispheres, and the Nonspecific group simply was told to fake brain damage. The author achieved a hit rate of 94.4% on subjective classification of a subsample of 195 Ss into brain-impaired vs. non-impaired categories. Stepwise discriminant analysis of the entire sample yielded two functions that achieved hit rates of from 94.9% to 97.2% for various base rates of malingering. Discrimination between control and faking Ss was much less accurate, and the latter were highly unsuccessful at generating believable patterns of lateralized cortical impairment. Posttest interviews were conducted to obtain information concerning faking strategy as well as factors that inhibited or facilitated the efforts to fake.