Forensic Assessments of Racial-Ethnic Differences in Genuine and Malingered Psychotic Presentations.

Competent forensic practice has required continued training and professional practice in differentiating between genuine and malingered presentations, especially within the spectrum of psychotic disorders. Historically, practitioners valued racial, ethnic, and cultural differences but often considered them as peripheral matters. In contemporary forensic practice, however, language and culture play preponderant roles.

Malingering and Defensiveness on the Spanish Personality Assessment Inventory: An Initial Investigation with Mostly Spanish-Speaking Outpatients.

Psychological assessments can be essentially invalidated by examinees' intentional response styles, such as (i.e., fabrication or marked overreporting of symptoms/impairment) and (i.

Validation of the Spanish SIRS with monolingual Hispanic outpatients.

Psychologists are faced with formidable challenges in making their assessment methods relevant to growing numbers of Hispanic clients for whom English is not the primary or preferred language. Among other clinical issues, the determination of malingering has profound consequences for clients. In this investigation, we evaluated a Spanish translation of the Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms (SIRS; Rogers, Bagby, & Dickens, 1992) with 80 Spanish-speaking Hispanic American outpatients.

A Study of the SIRS with severely traumatized patients.

Clinical research has revealed that traumatized patients often elevate feigning indicators on psychological measures, which raises the possibility that traumatization and concomitant dissociation may lead to misclassifications of malingering. Within the domain of feigned mental disorders, the Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms (SIRS; Rogers, Bagby, & Dickens, 1992) is a well established measure with excellent reliability and validity across clinical and forensic settings. Although recent studies have demonstrated its effectiveness with outpatient posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) samples, the SIRS usefulness with severely traumatized patients remains to be investigated.

Spanish translations of Miranda warnings and the totality of the circumstances.

Spanish-translated Miranda warnings are administered annually to thousands of Hispanic custodial suspects. In examining 121 Spanish translations and their English counterparts from 33 states, the lengths of Miranda warnings were generally comparable but marked differences were observed in the reading levels for individual Miranda components. The adequacy of Miranda translations varies markedly from minor variations to substantive errors.