Development and Validation of an Overreporting Scale for the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5)

Our aim in the current study was to develop a validity scale for the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5) to detect noncredible overreported responding. To this end, we used a rare symptoms approach and identified extreme response options on PID-5 items that were infrequently endorsed by students in 3 different university samples (N = 1,370) and in a psychiatric patient sample (N = 194). The resulting 10-item scale (the PID-5-ORS) produced adequate-to-good estimates of internal reliability and was significantly correlated with the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Restructued Form (MMPI-2-RF) overreporting validity scales, providing evidence of concurrent validity. The criterion validity of the PID-5-ORS was demonstrated in an analog simulation design study. More specifically, university students instructed to overreport (n = 80) scored substantially higher on the PID-5-ORS relative to both a group of genuine psychiatric patients and students instructed to complete the PID-5 under standard (honest) instructions (n = 161); the effect size magnitudes associated with these differences were large. Classification accuracy analyses further revealed that high scores on the PID-5-ORS were associated with high specificity (and thus, low rates of false positive classifications) in differentiating overreporters from genuine patients, with sensitivity being somewhat weaker. Public Significance Statement The current study developed a scale to identify individuals who engage in embellishment of mental health problems or other psychological dysfunction on the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5). The results indicate that the effort was generally successful, in that the scale differentiated research participants asked to feign problems on the PID-5 from both genuine patients and honest students. These findings will have implications for using the PID-5 in clinical practice.