Who did the WMT, MSVT, NV-MSVT & MCI research?

Where did the norms in these programs come from?

In his review of the WMT, Dr. David Hartman described the work of Dr. Green and his immediate colleagues as “the largest body of research on effort in the history of the profession” (2002, Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, volume 17, pages 709-714) and that was several years ago. For up-to-date references, please click the references button.

Dr. Paul Green, a practicing Clinical Neuropsychologist for 30 years, invented the WMT, the MSVT, the Nonverbal-MSVT and the MCI.

• He did all the validation of the original oral WMT (Green and Astner, 1995), on which he holds Canadian, U.S. & international copyrights.
• Green gathered all the data in the second generation WMT, which was in dos format (Green et al 1996).
• His data from over 1,500 patients and experimental controls are at the core of Green’s WMT Windows program (Green, 2003).

The number of cases in the existing WMT Windows program is over 3,000, including data from Dr. Roger Gervais, Dr. Lloyd Flaro, Dr. Thomas Merten and Dr. Robbi Brockhaus, who have independently gathered vast amounts of clinical and experimental data on the WMT for more than a decade and whose work has also been central to the validation and norming of the MSVT, NV-MSVT and MCI. Dr. Gervais has large amounts of data on these tests in chronic pain patients and patients with PTSD.

Dr. Flaro has tested many children with the WMT, MSVT & NV-MSVT. He has gathered data on an extremely important group of adults, who were seeking custody of their children. They were low functioning but had an incentive to appear unimpaired. Only 2 out of 118 cases in this rare sample failed the WMT. The woman with the lowest IQ (FSIQ of 49) passed the WMT!

WMT data on patients with dementia and on simulators versus good effort cases came from Drs. Merten and Brockhaus. Dr. Robbi Brockhaus has donated data on German patients with dementia and adults with mental retardation. It is important to compare the early and late dementia patients’ overall profile on WMT with the distinctively different profile from known simulators. This profile interpretation was supported by data from Puerto Rico from early dementia patients tested by Dr. Jorge Montigo.

Drs. Dan Drane and David Williamson have donated invaluable data on people with either seizure disorder or nonepileptic psychogenic seizures. They found that effort measured by WMT had a far greater impact on neuropsychological test scores than diagnosis or any other variable. (Drane, D., Williamson, D.J., Stroup, E.S., Holmes, M.D., Jung, M., Koerner, E., Chayter, N., Wilensky, A.J. & Miller. J.W. (2006) Impairment is not equal in patients with epileptic and psychogenic nonepileptic seizures. Epilepsia, 47 (11) 1879-1886)

Drs. Schmand (Holland), Gorissen (France) and Juan Carlos Sanz de la Torre (Spain) conducted a multi-country study of Green’s WMT in schizophrenic patients (2005, Schizophrenia Research). Drs. Patton and Mittenberg (USA), as well as Dr. Schmand (Holland) have contributed WMT data on dementia patients supporting data from Robbi Brockhaus, although only two WMT subtests were employed, which limits the information on the profile. The WMT Windows will have even more data from additional groups in the near future.

HIGH ACCURACY IN SIMULATOR STUDIES: The WMT has been consistently found to be close to or actually 100% accurate in classifying simulators versus good effort volunteers. Drs. Merten and Brockhaus have done many studies in Germany, using the WMT, MSVT and MCI, including simulator studies in German. More recently, Green’s MSVT has been found to be equally accurate in two German studies (Dr. Thomas Merten and Nina Blaskewitz, Berlin, Germany). A very large ongoing Brazilian study by Dr. John Courtney (South Bend, Indiana, & Rio de Janeiro) is providing strong support for the accuracy of Green’s MSVT Windows in discriminating between simulators versus good effort volunteers tested in Portuguese (both adults and children).

The MSVT test manual contains appendices summarizing (a) the Brazilian study; (b) normative data from children in grades two to five, given Green’s MSVT Windows and (c) data from people with soft tissue injuries tested with the MSVT in medical clinics in Toronto, Canada, run by Dr. Jack Richman, a distinguished Occupational Health Physician. The latter data are the subject of a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. See the full reference under the REFERENCES button:

Dr. David Gill (Psychiatrist, London, UK) recently replicated Richman et al.’s findings in London with a large series of patients undergoing a psychiatric IME.

Dr. Michael Chafetz donated MSVT data from nurses trying to retain their licenses and, hence, who are highly motivated to do well. Dr. Flaro contributed data on parents involved in custody disputes. Dr. David Ranks donated clinical data on both the WMT and MSVT.

Test-retest data were gathered by neuropsychologists around the world, including Drs. Ted Peck, Margaret Zellinger, Michael Chafetz, David Ranks, Stephanie Moore (USA), Neil Brooks, Alan Moss (UK) and Raymond Field (Australia) and others and the test retest correlations on WMT subtests were very high (appendix of WMT Test Manual, Green, 2003, revisions made in 2005, appendices available from Green’s Publishing).

Feedback on WMT Windows program development was provided by many, including Drs. Brent Kolitz-Russell, Dan Drane, David Hartman, Ken Hasseler, Lloyd Flaro, Roger Gervais, Paul Lees-Haley, Rich Salamone, Harold Smith, Michael Martelli, Jim McGovern, Robbi Brockhaus and Alan Moss. Special thanks to those who have co-written papers on WMT, including Drs. Paul-Lees Haley, Martin Rohling, David Williamson, Dan Slick, Roger Gervais, Lloyd Flaro and Grant Iverson.

Most of the above research data are to be found in the WMT Windows program and test manual (Green, 2003) and the MSVT test manual (Green, 2003, revised 2005).

The Nonverbal (NV)-MSVT data in the program were contributed by:

• Dr. Robert Cohen,
• Dr. Robert Denney,
• Dr. Lloyd Flaro,
• Dr. Milton Harris,
• Dr. Neil Brooks,
• Dr. Robbi Brockhaus,
• Dr. Paul Green,
• Dr. Roger Gervais
• Dr. Stephanie Moore,
• Dr. Thomas Merten
• Dr. David Ranks,
• Dr. Kevin Reilly,
• Dr. Robert Seegmiller,
• Dr. Thomas Wegman,
• Dr. John Knippa,
• Dr. Jan Wise
• Dr. Margaret Zellinger

Note to contributors: If your name should be here and it is omitted, please let us know and we will make sure your contribution is recognized.