A forced-choice technique to evaluate deafness in the hysterical or malingering patient.

Neuropsychological evidence of a factitious memory complaint

“…Feigning a bad memory looks much like forgetting, and it is not possible to observe directly the patient's subjective effort. Pankratz, Fausti, and Peed (1975) described a technique called Symptom Validity Testing to assess any functional sensory deficit. This model offers a new way to observe memory performance, and it has the potential to detect simulation (Pankratz, 1983).…”

Developing a Symptom Validity Test for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Application of the binomial distribution

“…The application of the binomial distribution in developing an SVT, however, is far less abstruse (Colby, 2000(Colby, , 2001a(Colby, , 2001b. Indeed, Pankratz, Fausti, and Peed (1975) published the first study using this technique to evaluate feigned deafness in a hysterical patient who was believed to be malingering. Essentially, SVTs are psychometric instruments that utilize a two-alternative forced-choice recognition format to detect response bias (i.e., poor or sub-maximal effort).…”

The New Gold Standard

“…The rapid expansion of awareness of anomalous data and the discovery of novel facts defined this developmental stage, all of which posed an enormous challenge to preexisting paradigms. Beginning with the early case study approach of Pankratz et al (1975) and followed by the work of Pankratz et al (1987) and Hiscock and Hiscock (1989), it became clear that people sometimes perform close to or below chance-level on simple forced-choice measures for reasons not explained by intellectual limitations or neurocognitive impairment. These early studies triggered a transformational period in our field, translating to a conceptual revolution or paradigm shift in the Kuhnian sense (Kuhn, 1962).…”