Brechje Dandachi-FitzGerald

Maastricht University | UM · Department of Clinical Psychological Science

The current study examined the prevalence of cognitive underperformance and symptom over-reporting in a mixed sample of psychiatric patients (N = 183). We employed the Amsterdam Short-Term Memory Test (ASTM) to measure cognitive underperformance and the Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology (SIMS) to measure the tendency to over-report...

During the last decades, symptom validity has become an important topic in the neuropsychological and psychiatric literature with respect to how it relates to malingering, factitious disorder, and somatoform complaints. We conducted a survey among neuropsychologists (N = 515) from six European countries (Germany, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Norway, an...

Objective: Performance and symptom validity tests (PVTs and SVTs) measure the credibility of the assessment results. Cognitive impairment and apathy potentially interfere with validity test performance and may thus lead to an incorrect (i.e., false-positive) classification of the patient's scores as non-credible. The study aimed at examining the f...

When patients fail symptom validity tests (SVTs) and/or performance validity tests (PVTs), their self-reported symptoms and test profiles are unreliable and cannot be taken for granted. There are many well-established causes of poor symptom validity and malingering is only of them. Some authors have proposed that a cry for help may underlie poor sy...

Psychotherapy aims to make patients better. As is true for any type of treatment, psychotherapy regularly fails to achieve this goal. Therapeutic failures may take many forms, and the list of possible reasons for failure is similarly extensive. As we will explain in this chapter, there is no conclusive definition of psychotherapeutic failure. Also,...

The paper “Neuropsychological malingering determination: The illusion of scientific lie detection” by Chunlin Leonhard and Christoph Leonhard (2024) critically assesses the use of symptom and performance validity tests (SVTs/PVTs) in forensic settings. The authors argue that the research community’s lack of critical examination leads to a flawed pe...

This archival study sought to determine whether psychological reports adequately communicate the results of Symptom Validity Tests (SVTs) and Performance Validity Tests (PVTs). We collected reports from a pool of 469 clinical psychological and neuropsychological assessments conducted across five Dutch hospitals. To be included, the administered SVT...

Objective: Performance below the actual abilities of the examinee can be measured using performance validity tests (PVTs). PVT failure negatively impacts the quality of the neuropsychological assessment. In our study, we addressed this issue by providing a brief corrective statement regarding invalidity to improve test-taking behavior. Methods: Thi...

Objective Psychotherapy may have many benefits for patients with mental health problems, but patients may also have negative experiences related to the therapy. Not much is known about these negative psychotherapy experiences and their impact on treatment outcome. The aim of this study was to examine the association between positive and negative ps...

Background Clients' adverse experiences during psychotherapy are rarely monitored in clinical practice or research trials. One obstacle here is the lack of a measure to gauge both positive and negative experiences during psychotherapy. We developed and evaluated a new instrument for measuring such experiences. Method The Positive and Negative Expe...

Social security disability assessors are required to objectively quantify disability with regards to potential ability to work. Difficulties arise when assessments need to be performed in the absence of objective medical data relying solely on self-report regarding subjective health complaints. In such cases, validity tests provide a useful tool du...

We asked 463 participants from 21 countries whether they had feigned and/or concealed having a coronavirus infection during the pandemic period. 384 respondents (83%) reported having experienced a coronavirus infection. They were, on average, younger and reported more chronic health issues than participants who said they had never been infected. 65...

Background Schema therapy (ST) in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have gained increasing interest in clinical practice and research. However, to date, there has been no synthesis of the literature on ST as treatment for adults with ASD. Through a scoping review, we aim to summarize the emerging research and literature on ST for adults wi...

Objective: The Self-Report Symptom Inventory (SRSI) is a relatively new instrument to detect symptom exaggeration. It contains a mix of plausible and pseudosymptoms, the rationale being that people who intend to exaggerate symptoms will overendorse both types of symptoms, whereas individuals responding truthfully will selectively endorse primarily...

The Self-Report Symptom Inventory (SRSI) intends to measure symptom overreporting. To assess the Dutch and German SRSI equivalence, both versions were split into two half-forms. Forty bilingual participants were randomly allocated to two groups that completed the first half in German and the second half in Dutch or vice versa. Each group completed...

Objectives: The Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) is a commonly used clinical measure; however, it contains no method to assess validity of self-report. The primary objective of this research was to examine the possibility of cut scores on the BDI-II indicating possible invalid symptom report in forensic neuropsychological evaluations. Seconda...

Performance validity tests (PVTs) are used to measure the validity of the obtained neuropsychological test data. However, when an individual fails a PVT, the likelihood that failure truly reflects invalid performance (i.e., the positive predictive value) depends on the base rate in the context in which the assessment takes place. Therefore, accurat...

The assessment of performance validity is essential in any neuropsychological evaluation. However, relatively few measures exist that are based on attention performance embedded within routine cognitive tasks. The present study explores the potential value of a computerized attention test, the Cognitrone, as an embedded validity indicator in the ne...

Some patients present symptoms in an exaggerated manner [1,2]. This behavior can be assessed with specialized tests: Symptom validity tests (SVTs) to measure overreporting of symptoms, and performance validity tests (PVTs) to measure underperformance on cognitive tests. But what does it mean when patients fail on multiple SVTs and/or PVTs? Does it...

In 2013, a special issue of the Spanish journal Clínica y Salud published a review on symptom and performance validity assessment in European countries (Merten et al. in Clínica y Salud, 24(3), 129–138, 2013). At that time, developments were judged to be in their infancy in many countries, with major publication activities stemming from only four c...

This is a short editorial to the special issue of Psychological Injury and Law. The first of the articles of this issue (Merten et al., Symptom and performance validity assessment in European countries: An update, in this issue) was conceived as the proper introduction. The collection contains eight contributions from authors doing their research i...

Both empirical and survey-based research indicate that invalid test performance occurs in clinical evaluations, even in contexts absent of known external incentive. Research indicates that clinical judgment alone, including profile analysis of objective test data without use of formal validity testing, is insufficient to adequately discriminate bet...

Feigning (i.e., grossly exaggerating or fabricating) symptoms distorts diagnostic evaluations. Therefore, dedicated tools known as symptom validity tests (SVTs) have been developed to help clinicians differentiate feigned from genuine symptom presentations. While a deviant SVT score is an indicator of a feigned symptom presentation, a non-deviant s...

The Self-Report Symptom Inventory (SRSI) was developed to expand the toolbox of self-report instruments available to detect symptom overreporting. Such instruments, today known as symptom validity tests, play a crucial role in both forensic evaluations and in a range of clinical referral questions. The SRSI was originally designed in the German lan...

Samenvatting Over nadelige effecten van psychotherapie is weinig bekend. Dit komt omdat negatieve reacties op psychologische interventies niet standaard worden geregistreerd in psychotherapie-trials. Deze studie beoogt meer inzicht krijgen in de potentieel negatieve effecten van psychotherapie, zoals gerapporteerd door patiënten. Deelnemers werden...

In an often-cited study, Murdock et al. (2010) found that therapists are more likely to attribute premature treatment termination to client characteristics than to themselves, a finding that the authors interpreted in terms of a self-serving bias (SSB). We replicated and extended the study of Murdock et al. (2010, study 2). Psychologists and psycho...

Objective There is limited research examining the impact of the validity of cognitive test performance on treatment outcome. All known studies to date have operationalized performance validity dichotomously, leading to the loss of predictive information. Using the range of scores on a performance validity test (PVT), we hypothesized that lower perf...

Symptoomvaliditeitstests in de rechtszaal 1 Eisers of verdachten van wie wordt vermoed dat ze klachten veinzen, duiken ook in de rechtszaal op en zorgen daar niet zelden voor verwarring. De juridische omgang met het onderwerp zou aan conceptuele helderheid en consistentie winnen, als deskundigen in voorkomende gevallen een speciale klasse van tests...

We asked students, clinicians, and people from the general population attending a public university lecture (n = 401) whether they knew others who (had) feigned symptoms. We also asked about the type of symptoms and the motives involved. A slight majority of proxy respondents (59%) reported that they knew a person who (had) feigned symptoms, and 34...

Authors have claimed that exposing individuals who report ambiguous symptoms with diagnostic labels may have an iatrogenic (i.e., harmful) effect. Experimental studies on what has been dubbed diagnosis threat have, indeed, documented impairments on cognitive performance tests and symptom self-reports among individuals whose attention has been calle...

Mental-health patients may report more symptoms than they actually experience. Experts and laypeople often view this overreporting as a sign of malingering. We show that there are multiple pathways to symptom overreporting: carryover effects from previous tests that lower the threshold for answering affirmatively to symptom items, suggestive misinf...

Performance Validity Tests (PVTs) are used to measure the credibility of neuropsychological test results. Until now, however, a minimal amount is known about the effects of feedback upon noncredible results (i.e., underperformance) on subsequent neuropsychological test performance. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of feedbac...

Psychotherapie beoogt patiënten beter te maken, maar kan om diverse redenen in deze opzet falen. Therapeutisch falen is een belangrijk onderwerp, die erkenning was tot voor kort niet vanzelfsprekend, stellen Harald Merckelbach en collega's. 'Dat psycho­ therapeuten mislukkingen nogal eens over het hoofd te zien, komt onder meer omdat ze geen classi...

Psychotherapie beoogt patiënten beter te maken, maar kan om diverse redenen in deze opzet falen. Therapeutisch falen is een belangrijk onderwerp, die erkenning was tot voor kort niet vanzelfsprekend, stellen Harald Merckelbach en collega's. 'Dat psycho­ therapeuten mislukkingen nogal eens over het hoofd te zien, komt onder meer omdat ze geen classi...

published in: De Psycholoog, 53 (3), 32-40.

Is presenting patients with moral reminders prior to psychological testing a fruitful deterrence strategy for symptom over-reporting? We addressed this question in three ways. In study 1, we presented individuals seeking treatment for ADHD complaints (n = 24) with moral primes using the Mother Teresa Questionnaire and compared their scores on an in...

Objective: We explored to what extent experienced neuropsychologists can predict distorted symptom presentation of clinically referred hospital outpatients. Method: Using clinical files and interview results, 31 neuropsychologists made predictions as to how 203 patients would perform on two response validity tests. Their predictions were matched...

Noncredible symptom reports hinder the diagnostic process. This fact is especially the case for medical conditions that rely on subjective report of symptoms instead of objective measures. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) primarily relies on subjective report, which makes it potentially susceptible to erroneous diagnosis. In this case report, we des...

Zur Praxis der Beschwerdenvalidierung wurde 2011 eine Umfrage unter europäischen Neuropsychologen durchgeführt ( Dandachi-FitzGerald, Ponds & Merten, 2013 ). Die Ergebnisse der deutschsprachigen Teilstichprobe werden berichtet (n = 211). Obwohl die Teilnehmer die Bedeutung einer sorgfältigen Beurteilung der Beschwerdenvalidität anerkannten, dominie...

Soms dikken patiënten hun probleem aan. Zoiets kan zichtbaar worden gemaakt met wat in jargon symptoomvaliditeitstests heet. Een tijd geleden biechtte een bevriende collega mij op dat ze lang niet altijd deze tests bij psychodiagnostisch onderzoek afnam. ‘Want’, zo vertelde ze mij, ‘straks scoort de patiënt afwijkend en dan moet ik er iets mee.’ Ho...

We explored the effects of feedback on symptom reporting. Two experimental groups (n = 15 each) were given a scenario with the option to exaggerate symptoms. Compared with a control condition (n = 15), both groups scored significantly higher on the Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology. Next, one group was confronted in a sympathetic wa...

In the past, the practice of symptom validity assessment (SVA) in European countries was considerably lagging behind developments in North America, with the topic of malingering being largely taboo for psychological and medical professionals. This was being changed in the course of the past decade with a growing interest in methods for the assessme...

In the past, the practice of symptom validity assessment (SVA) in European countries was considerably lagging behind developments in North America, with the topic of malingering being largely taboo for psychological and medical professionals. This was being changed in the course of the past decade with a growing interest in methods for the assessme...

In dit artikel presenteren we de resultaten van een enquête onder leden van de Nederlandse Vereniging van Neuropsychologie (NVN) en de sectie Neuropsychologie van het Nederlands Instituut voor Psychologie (NIP) over hoe neuropsychologen in de praktijk omgaan met onderpresteren bij cognitieve tests en overrapporteren van klachten. We rapporteren of...

The Medical Symptom Validity Test (MSVT) is a widely used memory test with three built-in effort measures that aim to detect feigning. We evaluated the merits of the MSVT as a broad screening tool for symptom validity. In study 1, we interviewed participants (N = 54) about the symptoms that they would and would certainly not feign. Non-specific som...

e Medical Symptom Validity Test (MSVT) beoogt onderprestatie te meten. Het is een veelgeroemde test, niet in de laatste plaats omdat ze lijkt te kunnen bogen op een imposante accuratesse. In studies waarin gezonde proefpersonen wel of geen geheugenbeperkingen veinsden, kon de MSVT beide groepen zeer goed onderscheiden. In dit artikel bespreken we z...

Bilateral stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) is an accepted treatment for advanced Parkinson's disease (PD) refractory to medical therapy.1 Despite motor improvement, postoperative changes in mood and behaviour have been reported.2 Besides a direct influence of STN stimulation, other factors such as changes in medication and maladaptation...