Abstract
Some researchers argue that the modified Stroop task (MST) can be employed to rule out feigning. According to these authors, modified Stroop interference effects are beyond conscious control and therefore indicative of genuine psychopathology. We examined this assumption using a within-subject design. In the first session, students (N = 22) responded honestly, while in the second session they were asked to read a vignette about test anxiety and then fake this condition. During both sessions, we administered an MST consisting of neutral, anxiety-related, and test anxiety-related words. Participants also completed the Self-Report Symptom Inventory (SRSI; Merten et al., 2016) that focuses on over-reporting of pseudosymptoms. Our feigning instructions were successful in that students succeeded in generating the typical MST effect by providing longer response latencies on anxiety related (r = 0.43) and test anxiety-related (r = 0.31) words, compared with neutral words. Furthermore, students endorsed significantly more pseudosymptoms on the SRSI (r = 0.62) in the feigning session than in the honest control condition. We conclude that the MST effect is not immune to feigning tendencies, while the SRSI provides promising results that require future research.
Highlights
The modified Stroop task (MST) is widely used in research on various psychological problems
We examined whether feigning instructions will cause heightened levels of pseudosymptom endorsement on the Self-Report Symptom Inventory (SRSI)
The MST has been proposed as a method for detecting pathologyrelated attentional bias (e.g., Becker et al, 2001)
Summary
The modified Stroop task (MST) is widely used in research on various psychological problems. Cannon (2003) found, that students instructed to feign mild brain trauma symptoms performed significantly worse on words pertaining to feigning relative to honest controls With this in mind, one could attribute Buckley et al.’s failure to obtain an MST effect in actors feigning PTSD to actors’ indifference toward their task words. Conditions such as test anxiety, dyslexia, and ADHD, which are correlated (Nelson et al, 2014), are feigned on a non-trivial scale because doing so may result in incentives (i.e., special academic privileges, such as extra time for completing exams; e.g., Musso and Gouvier, 2012) Given their experience with stressful exams, one would expect that students would find it relatively easy to feign an extreme form of test anxiety. We foresaw that the symptom endorsement on SRSI would be considerably amplified in the second session compared with the neutral, uninstructed, testing
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