Anxiety or advantage?: detecting malingered symptoms in college students seeking academic accommodations

Academic accommodations support equitable access to education for students whose mental health conditions meaningfully impair academic performance. Concerns exist regarding the potential to exaggerate or fabricate anxiety symptoms. This study examined whether cognitive tasks can differentiate credible generalized anxiety from malingered anxiety among college students. Participants were classified into probable GAD, malingering anxiety, or low GA control groups using a structured diagnostic interview and self-report measure. Participants completed working memory tasks (1-back and 3-back), a modified emotional Stroop task, and symptom validity tests. Malingering and probable GAD groups reported comparable anxiety symptom endorsement and severity. Working memory accuracy did not reliably distinguish groups, although malingerers demonstrated slower response times on the 1-back. In contrast, the modified Stroop task differentiated malingerers, who showed reduced accuracy and slower response times. These findings suggest that performance on cognitive tasks may aid in identifying exaggerated anxiety presentations in academic accommodation evaluations.