A Survey of Practices and Beliefs of Italian Psychologists Regarding Malingering and Symptom Validity Assessment

Abstract

A few years ago, an article describing the current status of Symptom Validity Assessment (SVA) practices and beliefs in European countries reported that there was little research activity in Italy (Merten et al., 2013). The same article also highlighted that Italian practitioners were less inclined to use Symptom Validity Tests (SVTs) and Performance Validity Tests (PVTs) in their assessments, compared with their colleagues from other major European countries. Considering that several articles on malingering and SVA have been published by Italian authors in recent years, we concluded that an update of the practices and beliefs of Italian professionals regarding malingering and SVA would be beneficial. Accordingly, from a larger survey that examined general psychological assessment practices and beliefs of Italian professionals, we extracted a subset of items specifically related to malingering and SVA and analyzed the responses of a sample of Italian psychologists who have some experience with malingering-related assessments. Taken together, the results of our analyses indicated that even though our respondents tend to use SVTs and PVTs relatively often in their evaluations, at this time, they likely trust more their own personal observations, impressions, and overall clinical judgment, in their SVA practice. Additionally, our results also indicated that Italian practitioners with some familiarity with malingering-related evaluations consider malingering to occur in about one-third of psychological assessments in which the evaluee might have an interest in overreporting.