Two student groups, introductory psychology (n=91) and advanced neuroscience (n=34) undergraduates, were asked to malinger a head injury on Rey’s 15-Item Test (FIT) and Dot Counting Test (DCT). The participants were randomly assigned to one of three motivation conditions (no motivation given, compensation, avoidance of blame for a motor vehicle accident) and to one of three coaching conditions (no coaching, coaching post-concussive symptoms, coaching symptoms plus warning of malingering detection). Analyses revealed a Motivation×Student Group interaction on the FIT, indicating that the advanced neuroscience students, particularly when in the compensation condition, malingered the most flagrantly. On the DCT, main effects for motivation and coaching on the qualitative variables and a Motivation×Coaching interaction on the accuracy variables indicated that those in the compensation condition performed the most poorly, and that coaching plus warning only tempers malingering on memory tasks, not timed tasks.
Simulation experiments in the malingering of head injury have provided valuable information about how normal individuals would feign brain damage. It has been shown, for instance, that malingerers generally overestimate the impairments associated with head injury (e.g., Coleman, Rapport, Millis, Ricker, & Farchione, 1998; Guilmette, Hart, & Giuliano, 1993; Iverson & Franzen, 1998; Mittenberg, Azrin, Millsaps, & Heilbronner, 1993), often display unusual error patterns on neuropsychological tests (Benton & Spreen, 1961; Osimani, Alon, Berger, & Abarbanel, 1997), produce more believable results on symptom checklists than on clinical tests (Martin, Hayes, & Gouvier, 1996), and perform worse on more obvious neuropsychological tasks than subtle ones (Bernard, McGrath, & Houston, 1996).
