Abstract
An individual may find it beneficial to feign having mental health difficulties under certain circumstances. Such circumstances may include presenting as ‘insane’ to receive a lesser punishment to a crime they committed or appearing as suffering from emotional problems after being involved in an accident to gain compensation. This type of responding is referred to as overreporting: exaggerating or fabricating mental health symptoms; and if an external incentive is present, malingering. Sometimes, an individual may research or be provided with specific symptoms to aid their overreporting in being perceived as realistic during an evaluation, which is referred to in this literature as coaching. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is a well-validated measure containing validity scales to identify overreporting. The MMPI-3 is the latest edition of the MMPI instruments, and there is currently no research evaluating the impact of coaching on the utility of the validity scales designed to detect overreporting, which was the aim of the current study. An analogue simulation design was used and participants were randomly sorted into five conditions: uncoached Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD; n = 75)/Major Depressive Disorder (MDD; n = 75), coached PTSD (n = 80)/MDD (n = 74), or genuine responding students (n = 93). Participants in overreporting groups were provided a hypothetical scenario that involved compensation seeking in the context of an accident and participants were instructed to feign having either PTSD or MDD (uncoached) or provided with additional information on symptoms for PTSD or MDD and informed about the validity scales (coached). Genuine patient comparison groups with diagnoses of PTSD (n = 66) and MDD (n = 103), respectively, were extracted from an archival database. The results indicated that overreporting groups scored significantly higher on most of the MMPI-3 substantive scales and all the overreporting validity scales compared to genuine responding groups. Further analyses indicated that overreporting produced less valid responses on the MMPI-3 compared to genuine responding groups across other relevant measures. Additionally, coaching did not appear to have an effect on the findings, but different disorder conditions yielded slightly different results. Lastly, classification accuracies were determined for each overreporting group and indicated lower thresholds than reported in the MMPI-3 manual may be optimal for the identification of overreporting. Implications, limitations, and future research for evaluating the impact coaching has on the MMPI-3 overreporting validity scales are discussed.