An investigation of implied Miranda waivers and Powell wording in a mock-crime study.

To guard against coerced self-incrimination, the Supreme Court of the United States outlined in Miranda v. Arizona (1966) what arresting officers must convey to custodial suspects for resulting statements to be admissible into evidence. During the ensuing decades, the Court has continued to grapple with the requisite wording and practical enforcement of these Constitutional rights. In Florida v. Powell (2010), the Court upheld the conviction of a defendant whose Miranda warning affirmed that before questioning he had the right to an attorney, but failed to specify that during questioning he had this right as well. In Berghuis v. Thompkins (2010), the Court ruled that the right to silence must be invoked explicitly, while valid Miranda waivers could be "implied" by a suspect's actions as well as words. The current study employed a mock crime design to assess the practical effects of these 2 rulings on waiver decisions. The wording change enabled by Powell had little effect on Miranda knowledge and reasoning. With regard to Thompkins, the type of waiver profoundly affected subsequent decisions: 13.7% exercised their rights following implied waivers versus 81.1% with explicit waivers. Importantly, the implied waiver condition produced much higher percentages of confessions (17.6% vs. 3.8%) and of admissions about incriminating information (29.4% vs. 9.4%).

Cross-validation of the PAI Negative Distortion Scale for feigned mental disorders: a research report.

A major strength of the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) is its systematic assessment of response styles, including feigned mental disorders. Recently, Mogge, Lepage, Bell, and Ragatz developed and provided the initial validation for the Negative Distortion Scale (NDS). Using rare symptoms as its detection strategy for feigning, the usefulness of NDS was examined via a known-groups comparison. The current study sought to cross-validate the NDS by implementing a between-subjects simulation design. Simulators were asked to feign total disability in an effort to secure unwarranted compensation from their insurance company. Even in an inpatient sample with severe Axis I disorders and concomitant impairment, the NDS proved effective as a rare-symptom strategy with low levels of item endorsement that remained mostly stable across genders. For construct validity, the NDS was moderately correlated with the Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms-Second Edition and other PAI feigning scales. For discriminant validity, it yielded a very large effect size (d = 1.81), surpassing the standard PAI feigning indicators. Utility estimates appeared to be promising for both ruling-out (low probability of feigning) and ruling-in (high probability of feigning) determinations at different base rates. Like earlier research, the data supported the creation of well-defined groups with indeterminate scores (i.e., the cut score ± 1 SEM) removed to avoid high rates of misclassifications for this narrow band.