Relationship between malingered psychometric profiles and personality styles in prisoners

Abstract

Introduction. One of the most typical clinical problems is the assessment of malingering in the field of forensic and penitentiary psychiatry.

Objective. The purpose of this research was to find associations between different personality types and psychometric response styles.

Material and methods. Subjects: participants consisted of 41 imprisoned male offenders. Instruments and data collection: the psychometric tools used were the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI-II) and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2). Statistics: data were analyzed with the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS, version 10.0). A p<0.05 significance level was proposed.

Results. There is significant correlation between personality types and styles of responses in the inventories.

Conclusions. The greatest relationships were found between personality types shaping cluster B of DSM-IV-TR and validity indexes that measure malingering as response style.