An unusually low false positive rate signals a patient exaggerating hearing loss

Evidence

Listeners can adopt both conservative and liberal criteria during an audiometric evaluation, and an audiologist or experimenter should be aware of the consequences of adopting these nonneutral criteria on the threshold estimate. In one extreme case, listeners exaggerating their hearing loss are overly conservative in their responses. The listener with a conservative bias has a decreased tendency to say, “Yes I heard something,” and only responds to signals presented at relatively high sensory levels. We can see from Figure 2–17 that this listener will produce very few false positives compared with the misses, as the white area under the curves is much smaller than the light gray area. Consequently, a lack of false positives is a potential indicator that a listener has adopted an overly conservative criterion. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 342

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the diagnostic tell of malingering in audiology — how missing false positives reveals dissembling, inverting the usual clinical worry about too many false alarms.