posted 02-19-2009 03:51 PM            

Just a theoretical idea to deal with.

Insights appreciated.

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posted 02-19-2009 04:13 PM            

deception aside, I wouldn't expect that questions regarding an unremembered incident (RQs) could possibly overcome the salience of PLCs which are based in memories of past acts.

Someone who is claiming amnesia is ripe ground for a Concealed Information Test. Since they claim not to have any memory of the event, finding question keys shouldn't be too much of a problem.

All that being said, total amnesia is a relatively rare duck outside of Peyton Place, All my Children and General Hospital, and a psychological/neurological assessment may be in order to determine if the subject is actually suffering from amnesia and if the apparent cause of the amnesia fits the symptoms which can be widely varied.

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Ex scientia veritas

posted 02-19-2009 08:42 PM            

Barry , do you have the citation of Dr. Barland´s article ?.

Thanks again,

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posted 02-19-2009 08:46 PM            

Of course a complete neuropsychological assessment is a must and feigned behavior should be rule out.

My question is because I´m also working with people who might exhibit malingering behaviors such as schizophrenia and neuropsychological impairments.

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posted 02-20-2009 12:43 AM         

My experience has been limited to only two types of amnesia: hypnotically induced and drug induced. I don’t have time to deal with both right now, so I’ll confine my remarks to drug induced amnesia.

The psychological literature suggests that if a person genuinely has drug-induced amnesia, such as an alcoholic blackout, then giving him the same drug may help him recall the event, because it reproduces the pharmacological environment of the brain that had existed at the time of the crime. When I was a graduate student, I wrote a brief paper describing some of the literature and relating it to the polygraph. The citation is: Barland, Gordon H. (1973) Implications of drug induced memory loss for interrogation and lie detection. Polygraph, 2(4), 287-294, If you have trouble locating a paper that old, I can email you a PDF copy.

I’ve examined perhaps a dozen criminal suspects who claimed that they didn’t know whether they committed the crime or not because they were on drugs that night and couldn’t remember a thing. Or they said everything was fuzzy; they couldn’t specifically remember doing it, but perhaps the police interrogation implanted some sort of vague “half-memory.”

In each case I ran a zone comparison test using lie comparison questions and relevant questions along the lines of “Can you specifically remember whether you ___?”; “Right now can you specifically remember whether you ___?”; and “Are you trying to con me when you say you can’t remember whether you ___?”

In every instance the result was DI, and in all cases but one, they quickly confessed that they were guilty and were feigning amnesia. I’ve always suspected that the reason they confessed so readily is that they were too honest to brazenly lie by completely denying their guilt, so they took the easy way out by claiming amnesia. Or perhaps they were simply hoping I wouldn’t be able to administer the test if they said they didn’t know whether they did it.

Hypnotically induced amnesia is worthy of a more complete response than I can give tonight.

Peace.

posted 02-20-2009 05:23 PM            

Thanks for your reply , that´s what I was looking for.
Because I have no access to Polygraph magazine, I really would appreciate if you can send me a PDF copy of your paper.

My e-mail is: biofeedback@hotmail.es

Thanks again for your time and expertise.

Best,

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posted 02-20-2009 05:27 PM            

Of course, a qualified mental health professional will have to make this determination.

I'm not at all sure that I would not support the notion of using a polygraph to find out. Schizophrenics are already confused, and out of touch with reality. Non-directive psychodynamic psychotherapy is known to exacerbate psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. The neutral feedback posture of the therapist, leaves the schizophrenic patient swimming in the open sea of their own thoughts - which are by definition out of touch with reality - without a lifeline in the form of statble and consistent environmental or interpersonal feedback.

A polygraph pretest interview is not a neutral feedback situation, but it is a biased feedback situation, in which we maneuver people around psychologically while setting the comparison questions. This is not dangerous with normal (reality-connected) persons, but we would not advised it with persons with already impaired perceptions and judgment about reality and their reaction to it.

Schizophrenia means several different things: 1) paranoid schizophrenia = hallucinations, 2) disorganized = no hallucintations, but severe reality testing and life-management/planning/judgment deficits due to a certain type of mental activity set, and 3) catatonic types = flat affect disconnected etc.

Neuropsychological deficits = specific neuropsych deficits, would be thought of as rather difficult to feign credibly. One would have to know a bit about the type of deficit to fool an evaluator, who would look for consistency of the deficit across multiple domains of functioning. Evaluators would also look at the exact constellation of symptoms to determine how well they fit (too well, or not well enough) the diagnosis that is feigned, along with any external motivation for malingering.

More likely someone is exhibiting some general mental health symptomology that can be teased out by a competent psychological evaluator as real or malingering. There are certain types of psychological tests (such as the M-FAST) that are designed to help evaluators with these tasks.

.02

r

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"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room."
--(Stanley Kubrick/Peter Sellers - Dr. Strangelove, 1964)

posted 02-20-2009 08:26 PM            

As a psychologist I known the difference between schizophrenia and malingering.
The point is that some people try to mimic a psychotic disorder in order to get some secondary gain or reward. For example , I had a guy who tried to appear psychotic in order to avoid to be send to prision.

At that time I had to use my skills as psychologist to find the truth and was not a polygraph examiner yet.

If someone would like to known more about malingering I would like to recommend this text :

Rogers Richard
" Clinical Assessment of malingering and deception"
The Guilford Press , 2.008.

By the way I prefer the SIMS test rather than M-Fast. SIMS test is available in English and Spanish.

Anyway, feigned symptoms is a fascinating issue.

Best,

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posted 02-21-2009 12:38 AM            

Excellent. I was a little worried that someone had a bright idea of using the polygraph to assess malingering in a patient diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Your clients seem to have external motivation for malingering, and you are no doubt equipped to pursue a competent determination of the diagnosis before proceeding.

I have the Roger's book, but I'm fairly sure mine is from before 2008. I've had it for some time. For anyone that doesn't have it - Roger's is about clinical deception, or deception in a clinical setting.

I haven't used the SIMS. I consider the M-FAST to be transparent, and am sometimes surprised that it seems to work. There are others, like the TOMM, but all of them are somewhat flawed, and depend on clinical skill. The TOMM attempts to disguise itself as a test of memory.

For those not familiar with this, we generally consider the SIMS and M-FAST and similar tests to be a screening test for malingering. They do not make the decision for us, but provide an expert evaluator with an indicator that further assessment for malingering is needed. Sounds like successive hurdles, dunnit.

In the case of malingering, there are not always diagnostic tests of malingering to do in the second/subsequent stage of evaluation. Further evaluation is sometimes in the form of a more comprehensive clinical formulation of all available information. Successive hurdles sometimes means that we simply attack the same problem with a different set of methods. Screening methods are intended to provide sufficient sensitivity to the issue, even slightly over-predicting the problem, while still reducing the pool or roster of potential positive cases to a manageable size that can be addressed with existing resources. Diagnosis is achieve when the subsequent evaluation methods increase the specificity of our judgment by ruling out all problems other than the one we eventually diagnose.

In screening polygraphs, it may be worth learning to sometimes think of additional field or background investigation as part of the second hurdle of evaluation.

.02

r

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"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room."
--(Stanley Kubrick/Peter Sellers - Dr. Strangelove, 1964)

posted 02-21-2009 08:58 AM            

As always your answers are clear and straightforward .

Best,

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