Lees-Haley Fake Bad Scale
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Lees-Haley Fake Bad Scale (FBS) or MMPI Symptom Validity Scale is a set of 43 items in the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), selected by Paul R. Lees-Haley in 1991 to detect malingering for the forensic evaluation of personal injury claimants.[1] It was endorsed by the MMPI publishers in 2006 and incorporated into the official scoring keys. A 2008 Wall Street Journal article noted that a few psychologists argued that it was controversial because they felt that some individuals with legitimate injuries would be categorized as faking bad.[2]
The items on the FBS were selected by Lees-Haley on the basis of frequency differences between a sample of individuals known to be malingering and individuals judged to have legitimate complaints and his personal observations of malingerers.[1]
The FBS is a generally accepted validity test. For example, in their survey of validity test use, Sharland and Gfeller (2007)[3] found that the FBS was the third most widely used validity test by neuropsychologists. In a more recent study, Martin, Schroeder, and Odland (2015) found in a survey of general practitioners that the FBS was the most widely used symptom validity test (SVT) for the MMPI-2 and one of the two most widely used for the MMPI-2-RF.[4]