Do You Know People Who Feign? Proxy Respondents About Feigned Symptoms
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Do You Know People Who Feign? Proxy Respondents About Feigned Symptoms Brechje Dandachi-FitzGerald 1 & Harald Merckelbach 2
&
Irena Bošković 3 & Marko Jelicic 2
Received: 3 March 2020 / Accepted: 22 July 2020 / Published online: 18 August 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract We asked students, clinicians, and people from the general population attending a public university lecture (n = 401) whether they knew others who (had) feigned symptoms. We also asked about the type of symptoms and the motives involved. A slight majority of proxy respondents (59%) reported that they knew a person who (had) feigned symptoms, and 34% knew a person who had admitted to them having feigned symptoms. According to our respondents, the most often feigned symptoms were headache/migraine, common cold/fever, and stomachache/nausea, and the most important reasons for doing so were sick leave from work, excusing a failure, and seeking attention from others. We conclude that feigning is part of the normal behavioral repertoire of people and has little to do with deviant personality traits and/or criminal motives. Also, the current emphasis in the neuropsychological literature on malingering, i.e., feigning motivated by external incentives, might be one-sided given that psychological motives, notably seeking attention from others and excuse making, seem to be important determinants of everyday feigning. Keywords Feigning . Prevalence . Malingering . DSM-5 . Proxy respondents
The literature on symptom exaggeration is blossoming (Bass & Halligan, 2014; Bass & Wade, 2019; Merckelbach et al., 2019; Suchy, 2019). “Malingering” is a frequently employed descriptive to refer to this phenomenon. However, following the convention of the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), this term is usually reserved for cases in which symptom exaggeration seems to be motivated by an external reward (e.g., obtaining compensation money in a litigation procedure). Several authors have criticized the importance of the external incentive criterion because clinicians cannot easily evaluate the presence of such an incentive (e.g., Berry & Nelson, 2010; Merten & Rogers, 2017; Erdodi et al., 2018). And even when clearly present, a link between the external incentive and the examinees’ actual
* Brechje Dandachi-FitzGerald [email protected] 1
Clinical Psychology Section, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands
2
Forensic Psychology Section, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands
3
Department of Psychology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
motivation to exaggerate symptoms still has to be established. Indeed, motivations to engage in symptom exaggeration are far more likely to be multifaceted rather than being either purely internal or external (Merten & Rogers, 2017; Hong, 2019). With these considerations in mind, we prefer the much broader term “feigning” because it encompasses symptom exaggeration that might be motivated by external, but also by internal (e.g., seeking attention or sympathy
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