The New Gold Standard

Assessment of Malingered Neuropsychological Deficits. Glenn J. Larrabee (Ed.). 2007. New York: Oxford University Press, 540 pp., $69.50 (HB) Developments in the area of malingering detection parallel several of Thomas Kuhn's observations concerning the nonlinear trend of progress in the history of science (Kuhn, 1962). For example, the naive assumption that traditional neuropsychological assessment procedures would straightforwardly generalize to compensation-seeking populations characterized an earlier status quo, a period Kuhn referred to as normal science. The central fallacy of this assumption was the idea that litigants and other claimants did not, as a group, behave differently from those seen in strictly clinical settings. The untenable presumption that astute clinicians were generally capable of forming accurate judgments about the validity of effort on the basis of observation was another received belief that characterized this now archaic era of practice.