Validation of malingered amnesia measures with a large clinical sample.

A large sample of chronic postconcussive patients with and without overt malingering signs was compared with objectively brain-injured patients on common episodic memory and malingered amnesia measures. Probable malingerers and traumatically brain-injured subjects were not differ-entiated on popular episodic recall tests. In contrast, probable malingerers performed poorly on the Rey 15-Item, Rey Word Recognition List, Reliable Digit Span, Portland Digit Recognition Test, and Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test recognition trial. These findings validated both commonly cited malingering measures and newly introduced methods of classifying malingering in real-world clini-cal samples. The base rate for malingering in chronically complaining mild head injury patients may be much larger than previously assumed. Traditional neuropsychological measures do not satisfacto-rily discriminate between cerebrally impaired people and ma-lingerers (Faust, Hart, Guilmette, 1988a, 1988b; Heaton, Smith, Lehman, Vogt, 1978). The response to this problem has been the development of single measures of malingering of neurocognitive impairments (Binder, 1993; Hiscock His-