IDENTIFICATION OF MALINGERED HEAD-INJURY ON THE HALSTEAD-REITAN BATTERY

Heaton et al. (1978) demonstrated that the performance of malingerers and actual head trauma patients could be distinguished on the HRB by d iscriminant analysis. The present study replicated Heaton et al.'s met hodology on a larger sample to provide a more stable function for disc riminating simulated and real head trauma. Malingerers (n = 80) were i nstructed to fake severe deficits without being obvious. Patients (n = 80) had documented trauma and were not litigating for compensation. G roups were matched on age, gender; and overall Impairment Index to per mit comparisons between patterns of performance. A crossvalidated step -wise discriminant function correctly identified 88.75% of the groups, with 83.8% true positives and 93.8% true negatives. This function was applied to several published data sets. Both malingerer and patient g roups were accurately identified in Heaton et al. (1978) and Trueblood and Schmidt (1993). Faust et al.'s (1988) adolescent malingerer and t he malingered performance of three litigating patients published by Cu llum et al. (1991), were also correctly classified.