In Assessing the Truth: How Forensic Psychiatrists and Psychologists Evaluate Litigants, Dr. Mark Levy, a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and forensic psychiatry expert witness writes:
Psychological and Neuropsychological testing provides an objective means of sorting out how much embellishment or minimization of symptoms may exist. From a psychological perspective, there is always a concern in personal injury litigation and criminal litigation as to the extent one may be exaggerating their symptoms. In divorce and custody proceedings, the opposite may be true. Whenever brain injury is at issue, there may be motivational issues that are difficult to for the plaintiff to overcome and for the examiner to assess…
A competent psychologist has to try to sort these issues out. How much is the underlying personality structure affecting the symptom presentation? How much (or little) of a brain injury has really occurred?In civil litigation the administration of reliable and valid “self-report” personality tests such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory – 2 (MMPI-2) and/or Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) and the Rorschach Inkblot Test (Rorschach) is the best way to find out what is going on. Testing is in fact an attempt to answer a “membership” question: to which group of independently diagnosed individuals in the data base does the examinee belong, based upon his pattern of test responses?