Some mental-health patients exaggerate their symptoms. Clinicians and laypeople often interpret this symptom overreporting as a sign of malingering (Martin, Schroeder, & Odland, 2015; Thompson, Lin, & Parsloe, 2018), a label with negative connotations such as dishonesty and antisocial traits. These connotations are also evident in how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Fifth Edition (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) portrays malingering. According to the DSM-5, the defining feature of malingering is the intentional overreporting of symptoms, motivated by financial or legal benefits. However, whereas malingerers will engage in symptom overreporting, not everyone who overreports symptoms is a malingerer. When this is overlooked, misunderstandings may arise. Consider, as an example, a widely used test called the Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology (SIMS; Smith & Burger, 1997). The SIMS asks respondents to indicate whether or not they suffer from atypical symptoms; for example, "Sometimes I lose all feeling in my hand so that it is as if I have a glove on." Using the SIMS, a clinician may test whether, relative to normative data, a patient endorses a heightened number of atypical symptoms. If so, the patient is said to overreport symptoms, and questions can be raised 837681C DPXXX10.

Objective: The Self-Report Symptom Inventory (SRSI) is a new symptom validity test that, unlike other symptom over-reporting measures, contains both genuine symptom and pseudosymptom scales. We tested whether its pseudosymptom scale is sensitive to genuine psychopathology and evaluated its discriminant validity in an instructed feigning experiment that relied on carefully selected forensic inpatients (n ¼ 40). Method: We administered the SRSI twice: we instructed patients to respond honestly to the SRSI (T1) and then to exaggerate their symptoms in a convincing way (T2). Results: On T1, the pseudosymptom scale was insensitive to patients' actual psychopathology. Two patients (5%) had scores exceeding the liberal cut point (specificity ¼ 0.95) and no patient scored above the more stringent cut point (specificity ¼ 1.0). Also, the SRSI cut scores and ratio index discriminated well between honest (T1) and exaggerated (T2) responses (AUCs were 0.98 and 0.95, respectively). Conclusions: Given the relatively few false positives, our data suggest that the pseudosymptom scale of the SRSI is a useful measure of symptom over-reporting in forensic treatment settings.

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link AbstractWe examined whether typical developmental trends in suggestion-induced false memories (i.e., age-related decrease) could be changed. Using theoretical principles from the spontaneous false memory field, we adapted two often-used false memory procedures: misinformation (Experiment 1) and memory conformity (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, 7/9-year old children (n = 33) and adults (n = 39) received stories containing associatively-related details. They then listened to misinformation in the form of short narrative preserving the meaning of the story. Children and adults were equally susceptible to the misinformation effect. In Experiment 2, younger (7/8-yearolds, n = 30) and older (11/12-year-olds, n = 30) children and adults (n = 30) viewed pictures containing associatively-related details. They viewed these pictures in pairs. Although the pictures differed, participants believed they had viewed the same pictures. Participants had to report what they could recollect during collaborative and individual recall tests. Children and adults were equally susceptible to memory conformity effects. When correcting for response bias, adults' false memory scores were even higher than children's. Our results show that age trends in suggestion-induced false memories are not developmentally invariant.

We examined whether self-reported symptoms are affected by explicit and implicit misinformation. In Experiment 1, undergraduates (N = 60) rated how often they experienced somatic and psychological symptoms. During a subsequent interview, they were exposed to misinformation about 2 of their ratings: One was inflated (upgraded misinformation), whereas another was deflated (downgraded misinformation). Close to 82% of the participants accepted the upward symptom misinformation, whereas 67% accepted the downward manipulation. Also, 27% confabulated reasons for upgraded symptom ratings, whereas 8% confabulated reasons for downgraded ratings. At a follow-up test, some days later, participants (n = 55) tended to escalate their symptom ratings in accordance with the upgraded misinformation. Such internalization was less clear for downgraded misinformation. There was no statistically significant relation between dissociativity and acceptance or internalization of symptom misinformation. In Experiment 2, a more subtle and implicit form of misinformation was employed. Undergraduates (N = 50) completed a checklist of symptoms and were provided with feedback for some symptoms (targets), misleadingly suggesting that a slight majority of their peers experienced these targets on a regular basis. Next, participants rated the checklist again. Overall, symptom ratings went down for control but not for target symptoms. Taken together, our results demonstrate that symptom reports are susceptible to misinformation. The systematic study of symptom misinformation may help to understand iatrogenic effects in psychotherapy.

Associative memory has been increasingly investigated in immersive virtual reality (VR) environments, but conditions that enable physical exploration remain heavily under-investigated. To address this issue, we designed two museum rooms in VR throughout which participants could physically walk (i.e., high immersive and interactive fidelity). Participants were instructed to memorize all room details, which each contained nine paintings and two stone sculptures. On a subsequent old/new recognition task, we examined to what extent shared associated context (i.e., spatial boundaries, ordinal proximity) and physically travelled distance between paintings facilitated recognition of paintings from the museum rooms. Participants more often correctly recognized a sequentially probed old painting when the directly preceding painting was encoded within the same room or in a proximal position, relative to those encoded across rooms or in a distal position. A novel finding was that sequentially probed paintings from the same room were also recognized better when the physically travelled spatial or temporal distance between the probed paintings was shorter, as compared with longer distances. Taken together, our results in highly immersive VR support the notion that spatiotemporal context facilitates recognition of associated event content.