The Infrequency-Posttraumatic Stress Disorder scale (Fptsd) for the MMPI-2: development and initial validation with veterans presenting with combat-related PTSD

Researchers have identified difficulties associated with the use of traditional Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2; Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989) validity scales with survivors of traumatic events. A new scale, the Infrequency-Posttraumatic Stress Disorder scale (Fptsd), was created from MMPI-2 items that were infrequently endorsed by 940 male combat veterans presenting for treatment at the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) clinics of 2 Veterans Affairs Medical Centers. A variety of statistical methods were implemented that preliminarily established Fptsd's validity with a validation sample of 323 additional PTSD-diagnosed combat veterans. Results indicate that, relative to previously established validity and overreporting scales (F, Fb, and Fp), Fptsd was significantly less related to psychopathology and distress and better at discriminating simulated from genuinely reported PTSD. Clinical implications are discussed concerning the use of Fptsd to assess disability-seeking veterans suspected of overreporting PTSD symptoms.     

Thomas Wolfe: Study of a Wanderer

Thomas Wolfe was an American novelist who in his short and tragic life (1900-1939) was preoccupied with themes of lost youth, memory, transience and an insatiable wandering. Wolfe was preoccupied with what I have seen, felt and thought. He was a wanderer who in his brief life made seven voyages to Europe and compulsively explored that continent. He would never own a home or a piece of land. He rarely lived in an apartment for more than a year and more commonly for just a few months. The purpose of this paper is to explore the meaning of Wolfe's tormented wandering and his endless searching. It will be my thesis that Wolfe demonstrated an inability to mourn. His writings are an attempt to recapture his past and to restore a lost world. Emphasis will be placed on themes of loss and mourning, insatiable hunger and desire, preoccupation with transience and death, and a search for that which was lost.     

Path integration while ignoring irrelevant movement

Participants attempted to return to the origin of travel after following an outbound path by locomotion on foot (Experiments 1-3) or in a virtual visual environment (Experiment 4). Critical conditions interrupted the outbound path with verbal distraction or irrelevant, to-be-ignored movements. Irrelevant movement, real or virtual, had greater effects than verbal or cognitive distraction, indicating inability to ignore displacement during path integration. Effects of the irrelevant movement's direction (backward vs. rightward) and location (1st vs. 2nd leg of path) indicated that participants encoded a configural representation of the pathway and then cognitively compensated for the movement, producing errors directly related to the demands of compensation. An encoding-error model fit to the data indicated that backward movement produced downward rescaling, whereas movement that led to implied rotation (rightward on 2nd leg) produced distortions of shape and scale.     

Utility of the trauma symptom inventory's atypical response scale in detecting malingered post-traumatic stress disorder

The authors examined the Trauma Symptom Inventory's (TSI) ability to discriminate 88 student post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) simulators screened for genuine PTSD from 48 clinical PTSD-diagnosed outpatients. Results demonstrated between-group differences on several TSI clinical scales and the Atypical Response (ATR) validity scale. Discriminant function analysis using ATR revealed 75% correct patient classification but only 48% correct simulator classification, with an overall correct classification rate of 59% (positive predictive power [PPP] = .71; negative predictive power [NPP] = .51). Individual ATR cutoff scores did not yield impressive classification results, with the optimal cutoff (T score = 61) correctly classifying only 61% of simulators and patients (PPP = .66, NPP = .54). Although ATR was not developed as a malingered PTSD screen, instead serving as a general validity screen, caution is recommended in its current clinical use for detecting malingered PTSD.