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P. A. Arbisi and Y. S. Ben-Porath (1995) originally proposed that the Infrequency Psychopathology scale, F(p), be used as the final step in an algorithm to determine the validity of a Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) protocol. The current study used taxometric procedures to determine the latent structure of F(p) among examinees with profiles that would necessitate the interpretation of F(p) when using Arbisi and Ben-Porath's proposed algorithm. Participants included a subsample of 289 consecutively referred pretrial forensic examinees adjudicated incompetent to stand trial with high Infrequency (F) scale scores, thereby providing a sample that would be expected to have a high base rate of persons with bona fide psychopathology and persons with incentive to overreport psychopathology. Using MAMBAC and MAXEIG, F(p) produced a taxonic latent structure within the subgroup of examinees who obtained raw scores on F of greater than 17. These results support Arbisi and Ben-Porath's original proposal to use F(p) to identify a distinct subgroup of overreported MMPI-2 protocols within forensic psychiatric examinees with high elevations on F. Implications and suggestions for future research are provided.

The comparability of the MMPI-2 in American Indians with the MMPI-2 normative group was investigated in a sample of 535 Southwestern and 297 Plains American Indian tribal members with contrasting sociocultural and historical origins. Both American Indian tribal groups had clinically significant higher T scores (> 5 T points) on 5 validity and clinical scales, 6 content scales, and 2 supplementary scales than did the MMPI-2 normative group. There were no significant differences between the 2 tribal groups on any of the MMPI-2 clinical, content, or supplementary scales. Matching members of both tribes with persons in the MMPI-2 normative group on the basis of age, gender, and education reduced the magnitude of the differences between the 2 groups on all of these scales, although the differences in T scores still exceeded 5 T points. It appears likely that the MMPI-2 differences of these 2 American Indian groups from the normative group may reflect their adverse historical, social, and economic conditions.

R. W. Robin, R. L. Greene, B. Albaugh, A. Caldwell, and D. Goldman (2003) reported that members of 2 American Indian tribal groups had statistically significant higher T scores on several MMPI-2 clinical, content, and supplementary scales than did the MMPI-2 normative group. The present study investigated the empirical correlates of the MMPI-2 scales in these American Indian tribal members. There were a large number of significant correlates reflecting antisocial symptoms with Scales 4 (Psychopathic Deviate), 9 (Hypomania), Anger, and Antisocial Practices. There were even a larger number of significant correlates reflecting generalized distress and negative affect with Scales 7 (Psychosthenia), 8 (Schizophrenia), Anxiety, Obsessions, Depression, and Welsh Anxiety. The rationally derived MMPI-2 content scales generally had larger correlations with these constructs than the clinical scales. Thus, the differences reported by R. W. Robin et al. (2003), appear to reflect behaviors and symptoms that American Indians participants were experiencing rather than test bias.

Data from several clinical samples and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory--2 standardization group are presented to familiarize the reader with response patterns of different groups on a new validity scale designed to assist in the identification of exaggeration or fabrication of psychological disturbance. Sensitivity-specificity analyses are included along with suggestions for use of the F(p) Scale with other validity scales. Cautions about setting single cutoff scores are also discussed.

The ability of people to recognize words that they could not identify was examined. After studying a list of 15 words, participants completed a word fragment test consisting of 4-letter fragments of both studied and nonstudied words. Whether they were able to solve a particular fragment or not, participants then made an episodic recognition judgment. Even when participants were unable to solve a fragment, their recognition accuracy was significantly higher than chance. This effect was significant when list length was increased, when 2-letter fragments were used, when first letters were excluded from fragments, and when the letter casing and the presentation modality were changed from study to test. It also occurred when participants attempted to identify fragments at study and rated words at test. Recognition without identification is attributed to the use of orthographic information when determining the familiarity of a test item.

The typology of overreporting, which is a deliberate attempt to amplify symptoms, simulate psychopathology, or understate coping capacities, was examined using taxometric procedures with Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) Infrequency scales [F and F(p)] in psychiatric inpatient and Veterans Affairs (VA) medical center treatment settings. Overreporting was identified as a taxon using several taxometric procedures, and the multiple estimates of the taxon base rate were consistent within each sample. Mean base-rate estimates were .27 and .19 for the psychiatric inpatient and VA medical center settings, respectively. Overall classification rates ranged from .80 to .97 across the 2 settings, which supports the use of F and F(p) in the identification of overreporting on the MMPI-2 in psychiatric inpatient and VA medical center settings.

The revelation effect is the tendency to call an item on a recognition test "old" if it is preceded by a different task interpolated between study and test. Seven experiments explored the generality of the revelation effect across a number of interpolated tasks. A revelation effect emerged when a variety of tasks preceded recognition test items; the effect was found for test items that followed a memory-span task, a synonym-generation task, and a letter-counting task. The compatibility between the test stimuli and the stimuli that composed the interpolated task was found to be a critical factor. With words as stimuli on a recognition test, a revelation effect was found when the stimuli in the interpolated task were words and letters. However, when numbers were the stimuli in the interpolated task, no revelation effect was found.

Seven experiments demonstrate the robustness of the revelation effect, which is the tendency to call recognition test items old if they are distorted when they initially appear and if they are revealed before the recognition judgment. With anagrams as the distortion, a revelation effect was found in within- and between-subjects designs, in a frequency-judgment task, in a list-discrimination task, when new items were used as targets, when the study list and the test were presented in different modalities, and when the word that was revealed did not match the word that was recognized. These results challenge accounts that attribute the revelation effect either to an increase in the familiarity of the revealed test word or to a positive response bias.

When Ss are required to recall lists containing both words and digits, memory span is higher when the digits precede the words than when the words precede the digits. In Experiment 1, both forward and backward recall were tested; it was demonstrated that this category-order effect reflects the input position, and not the output position, of the items. Experiment 2 revealed that this effect was not eliminated by a filled retention interval. Experiment 3 showed that the effect was eliminated when lists were presented at a fast presentation rate. In Experiment 4, the effect was eliminated when Ss engaged in articulatory suppression. A 5th experiment extended the findings of Experiment 4 to the case in which lists are composed of semantically related or unrelated words. These results suggest that category-order effects reflect mnemonic activity that Ss engage in during list presentation and do not arise from structural characteristics of the memory system.

In recognition, types of stimuli that are relatively easy to classify as old when old are also relatively easy to classify as new when new. The experiments reported here extend this mirror effect to discriminations among above-zero situational frequencies. Frequency discrimination exhibits a mirror effect when words are compared with nonwords or when low-linguistic-frequency words are compared with high-linguistic-frequency words. Accurate knowledge concerning the relative memorability of test items is neither necessary nor sufficient for the presence of a mirror effect.

The series of experiments presented in this article replicate the interaction that B. H. Challis and D. R. Brodbeck (1992) reported between list design (blocked or mixed) and level of processing for word fragment completion: The advantage for semantically processed words over shallowly processed words was greater when the conditions were blocked than when they were mixed on the study list. A similar interaction was found for perceptual identification (a data-driven implicit task) and priming in general knowledge questions (a conceptually driven implicit task). However, both data-driven and conceptually driven explicit tasks failed to reveal such a pattern.

We investigated performance on implicit and explicit memory tasks in subjects diagnosed with major depression and matched controls. Depressed subjects showed impaired performance on both the explicit and implicit tasks in comparison with controls. These findings are in contrast to groups such as amnesic patients and older adults, who show preserved abilities on implicit tasks and deficits on explicit tasks.

Auditory presentation of verbal items leads to larger recency effects in recall than visual presentation. This enhanced recency can be eliminated if a stimulus suffix (an irrelevant sound) follows the last item. Four experiments tested the hypothesis that recency and suffix effects in serial recall result from a speech-specific process. It was demonstrated that serial recall of musical notes played on a piano exhibited substantial recency effects. These recency effects were reduced when the list items were followed by either a piano chord or the word start. However, a white-noise suffix had no effect on recency. This pattern of data is consistent with current work on auditory perception and places constraints on theories of recency and suffix effects.

Seven experiments are reported in which subjects were tested for immediate serial recall of mixed-modality lists. On mixed auditory-visual lists, there was an advantage for auditory items at all serial positions. This was due to both a facilitation of auditory items and an inhibition of visual items on mixed lists, as compared with single-modality lists. When presented on a list containing items read silently, recall of items that were silently mouthed by the subject demonstrated patterns similar to those found with auditory items. When presented on a list containing items read aloud, recall of mouthed items showed patterns similar to those found with silently read items. The auditory advantage on mixed lists was found even when the list items were acoustically similar or identical and was not reduced by midlist auditory suffixes. The results suggest that modality differences in recall of mixed-modality lists are based on information different from that responsible for modality differences in recall of single-modality lists.