A comparison of the MMPI-2-RF and PAI overreporting indicators in a civil forensic sample with emphasis on the Response Bias Scale (RBS) and the Cognitive Bias Scale (CBS).

Abstract

The Cognitive Bias Scale (CBS; Gaasedelen, Whiteside, Altmaier, Welch, & Basso, 2019) was developed as a Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) indicator of poor performance on Performance Validity Tests (PVTs) in a neuropsychological context. The current study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of the CBS in a forensic disability sample through a series of analyses by comparing it to other PAI validity scales and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)-2-RF overreporting scales with an emphasis on the Response Bias Scale (RBS), which guided the development of the CBS. The participants in this study were drawn from an archival dataset containing 588 consecutive civil disability claimants. Findings showed the RBS and the CBS yielded similar patterns of negative correlations to PVTs, with RBS effect sizes being somewhat larger in most comparisons. Results of ANOVAs showed that the RBS produced the largest effect sizes in distinguishing between incentive only versus probable/definite malingered neurocognitive dysfunction (MND) groups, followed by the CBS. Estimates of sensitivity and specificity were comparable between the RBS and CBS at liberal cut scores, but the RBS was more specific to detecting Probable/Definite MND at more conservative cutoffs. Hierarchical logistic regression analyses showed that RBS accounted for 6% variance over CBS in the probable/definite MND classification, whereas the CBS accounted for 2% variance beyond the RBS. Overall, the results of this study support the utility of the CBS as the most effective PAI validity scale for detecting MND in a civil disability sample, and the RBS generally outperformed the CBS to some degree in all analyses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).