Relative practical utility of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Restructured Clinical Scales versus the Clinical Scales in a chronic pain patient sample.

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) Restructured Clinical (RC) Scales comprise the core of the new MMPI-2 Restructured Form. They were developed to retain the familiar clinical descriptive characteristics of the original basic scales while correcting a number of major psychometric shortcomings. The resulting scales are intended to be more unidimensional and unique, with improved convergent and discriminant validity. These improvements should be most evident in client samples where the traditional scales yield global and diffuse elevations, interpretively very challenging to the clinician. In the present study the RC Scales were compared to the traditional Clinical Scales in differentiating depressed (n = 239) versus nondepressed (n = 77) neuropsychology outpatients, all of whom experienced chronic pain, and most also reported other syndromes. Multiaxial diagnoses were assigned by practicing clinicians using a variety of data sources, including MMPI-2 Clinical Scales but not the RC Scales. Whereas both sets of scales achieved good overall classification rates of about 85%, the RC Scales did so using significantly fewer scales, yielding a more focused, efficient, and clinically useful profile. In the depressed group, 7 of the 8 basic scales (which exclude Scales 5 and 0) were clinically elevated, whereas only 2 of the 8 RC Scales were elevated (in addition to the demoralization scale RCd). These findings offer significant implications for the psychological assessment of chronic pain patients.