Forensic Psychology For Dummies (93 page)

You can’t use these aspects definitively to determine malingering, but they can be an indication that a more systematic examination is necessary using standardised tests (which I define in Chapter 9).

Evaluating reported symptoms

One of the most highly regarded standardised procedures for assessing malingering is the Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms (SIRS). The latest version has 172 items and takes about half an hour to complete. Some of the questions are subtly repeated to check consistency in responses. The following issues illustrate some aspects of how the SIRS procedure works:

If rare symptoms are described that are known to occur in less than one out of every ten patients, the tester’s suspicions are aroused. Claims about a lot of these rare symptoms are a useful indicator of some sort of malingering.

Claiming a large number of symptoms has to be treated with caution. Severely mentally ill patients typically have rather few symptoms and malingerers tend to over-egg the pudding.

If an offender claims a lot of well known ‘obvious’ symptoms but few less obvious ones, the tester may suspect malingering.

The claim of really odd, very unlikely, symptoms is also a pointer to faking. Preposterous symptoms are extremely rare and if a person claims to have a lot of them, the tester will question the individual’s honesty.

The tester carefully examines whether the reported symptoms are consistent with each other and with observations available from other people. For example, someone claiming to be very depressed who has a healthy appetite may well be faking, as is a person claiming he’s suffering from tremors that no one has ever seen.

Testing memory

Memories are highly malleable and subject to being distorted. One understandable problem, therefore, is determining whether someone genuinely believes the memories even if the events didn’t happen (as I describe in Chapter 4). A different problem arises, however, when a suspect claims not to remember what happened. Such amnesia or other forms of memory loss may be relevant to claims of brain injury or the inability to give an account of what happened in a crime for which the person is accused.

Various procedures have been developed to assess memory impairment. One of the most widely used is the Test of Memory Malingering (TOMM). This test was developed by comparing how people with known brain injuries perform against what’s typical of responses from the population at large. The person with an unusually low score, but a pattern of responses that doesn’t relate to known brain injuries, may be thought to be feigning the memory problems.

This clever test appears to be an ordinary test of memory that seems more difficult than it actually is. So it has the paradoxical benefit that if the person being tested gets an exceedingly low score, the individual’s likely to be trying to pull the wool. But someone who gets a high score also doesn’t have the claimed memory problem. Getting the appropriate score and pattern of answers that do relate to genuine memory problems is difficult to feign without knowing the inner workings of the test.

Exploring Cognitive Distortions, Justifications and Sexual Deviance

One of the challenging features of many offenders, is that they see other people and their own actions in distorted and sometimes warped ways. Their thoughts don’t follow a logic that non-offenders would think appropriate (as I discuss in Chapter 2).

A particularly challenging group of criminals in this regard are those convicted of sexual offences, whether the crime is the abuse of children, rape or other criminal sexual activities. These criminals’ activities and experiences are caught up with particular ways of thinking about sex, including the sort of sometimes bizarre fantasies they have (that can shape their desires) and how they justify their actions. A child molester, for example, may claim that his 4-year-old victim wore suggestive clothing and so seduced him, or that because his wife wouldn’t accept his sexual advances, raping his daughter was acceptable.

Such individuals tend to think about their offending in ways that the great majority of people would think was very odd and irrational. These cognitive distortions contribute to them justifying the crime to themselves and anyone else who asks them about it. They don’t think of what they’ve done as wrong. Their justifications shape their criminal activity. Therefore, psychologists developed special procedures to explore these aspects of offenders’ thoughts and attitudes. These tests allow the clinician to develop a profile of the offender’s sexual orientation and psychology that’s of value in developing treatment programmes (as I discuss in Chapter 15), and predicting whether the individual is likely to continue to be dangerous to other people. In some cases these assessments can be used in court to form a view of the accused and the nature of their crime, as in the later sidebar ‘Psychosexual tests in action’.

One widely used assessment of a person’s psychosexual characteristics is the Multiphasic Sex Inventory, which consists of 300 questions describing aspects of a person. Respondents have to indicate whether the questions are true or false for themselves. The test takes about an hour and a half to complete and is analysed under a number of different headings that provide the profile of scores. These analysed areas include:

The person’s normal sex drives and interests, to determine whether the respondent is telling the truth or trying to present what sounds like normal behaviour – in other words, what the respondent believes the tester thinks is acceptable.