Malingering and All That

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This course will deal with illness fabrication (faking bad) and illness denial (faking good) in forensic contexts. It will investigate phenomena of fantasy proneness and related concepts, such as pseudologia fantastica and super normality. Also, attention will be given to defendants or claimants who feign conditions such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), psychosis, and memory disorders. The psychometric detection of feigning is also relevant and therefore included in this topic.

Experts are not considered skilled at detecting malingered symptoms, although they often think they are. To fully grasp the problems that surround the issue of detecting faking good and faking bad, one must understand the idea of signal detection and how there exists a tradeoff between sensitivity (correctly classifying fakers) and false positives (classifying honest people as fakers).  Only when students are familiar with this way of thinking can they critically evaluate emthods and tests used to screen for faking. This psychometric approach is strongly advocated in the current course, and students will gain hands-on experience with several detection methods.
The corresponding practical for this course is: Malingering and All That