Inappropriate Use of the Modified Somatic Perception Questionnaire (MSPQ) to Diagnose Malingering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The Modified Somatic Perception Questionnaire (MSPQ) is frequently used by psychologists contracted by car insurance companies as a measure of malingering medical symptoms.The MSPQ has not been validated on patients injured in car accidents: the use of MSPQ on that patient group deserves methodological scrutiny.Method: The overlap of individual MSPQ items with symptoms typically reported by patients injured in motor vehicle accidents (MVAs) was examined, including also the post-concussive and whiplash symptoms and signs of autonomic dysregulation as often noted with unrelenting pain, pain related insomnia, and sudden spikes of stabbing back or neck pain.Results: About two-thirds of MSPQ items (8 of the 13 scored items, i.e., 61.3%) show a definite overlap with medical symptoms legitimately experienced by post-MVA patients.Three of these, the dizziness, blurring of vision, and nausea, are listed in the widely used Rivermead Post-Concussion Symptoms scale where they are scored correctly as indicators of the post-concussion syndrome, not as signs of malingering.Three other items, "Muscles in neck aching," "Legs feeling weak," and "Muscles twitching or jumping", can be considered as associated with whiplash injury to cervical spine or also with sprain or strain of other tissues, and the associated fatigue.Furthermore, symptoms of "Feeling hot all over" and Sweating all over" are familiar to persons who experienced sudden episodes of excruciating back pain.Discussion: Symptoms similar to post-MVA patients are also experienced by patients with industrial injuries such as on construction sites, and also in war veterans who sustained concussive and whiplash injuries in their exposure to violent blasts.These patients are particularly vulnerable to being falsely diagnosed as malingerers (or expressed in other words, as magnifying or exaggerating their symptoms).Conclusions: Using the MSPQ as a test of malingering on such (or on similar) clinical groups constitutes malpractice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".