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Personality Assessment(Aiken)

• Personality: a general style of behaviour and interaction• Allows us to “predict” things about a person

• It is very rough, but pervades everything

• Useful to know• Clinical purposes (personality disorders)

• Selection

• Legal purposes (dangerousness etc)

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Assessing personality

• Methods vary greatly• depend on the personality theory the adhere to

• General idea: describe the “patterns” of personality

• 2 broad approaches• objective

• projective

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Objective assessment

• Idea: pose various statements/questions to clients, and get their response (sometimes scaled)

• The tests are standardised (everyone gets the same) and use group norms

• Require very little interpretation for scoring• detailed instructions (hence objective)

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Problem of naughty clients• How do you know your clients are telling the truth?

• They might not even know the truth!

• We need a method to ensure we getting accurate data• Can use a bit of stats to detect “fake good” and “fake

bad” responses (very difficult to do)

• Other problems: reactivity (acquiesence, etc)

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Reliability & validity issues• Difficult to have reliable tests

• “personality” is always expressed in a situation - if it changes, the responses change

• Standardisation tries to control this

• Validity is also hard to establish• faking is easy & frequent (esp in clinics)

• “Jingle effect” - client misunderstands the questions (“anxiety” not the same as “hostility”)

• Scores should be interpreted accordingly

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Some popular objective scales

• Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI)

• 16 Personality Factor test (16PF)

• Eysenk Personality Questionnaire (EPQ)

• Minnesota multiphasic personality index, 2nd edition (MMPI-2)

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MBTI

• Based on Jung’s personality theory

• Measures people on 4 factors:• Introversion-Extraversion (I-E)

• Sensing-Intuition (S-N)

• Thinking-Feeling (T-F)

• Judging-Perceptive (J-P)

• Everyone falls into one of 16 categories

• Each factor has about 200 questions to it

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MBTI

• Famous people:• Saddam Hussein - INTJ

• Bill Gates - INTP

• Clint Eastwood - ISTP

• but….

• Jesus of Nazareth - ENTP

• Ted Bundy - ENTP (?)

• JFK - ESFP

• Chuck Norris - ESFP (?)

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MMPI• MMPI published in 1943

• Clinical scale

• Includes items on attitudes, motor disturbances, emotions, etc.

• Contained 550 items

• Consisted of 9 scales, plus 5 other scales for validity checking• includes a “fake good” and “fake bad” scale (L)

• includes a “overcritical/overgenerous” scale (K)

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MMPI-2

• Revised MMPI came out in the 80s• Removed sexist language etc

• Updated norms - separate adult and adolescent forms

• Is now able to measure type A personality, eating disorders, drug abuse

• Improved for non-clinical use

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General problems with objective assessment

• Typing scales tend to be too general (everyone into x categories)• Increasing the number of factors helps

• Having too many factors does not help• Too much complexity to understand; just a bunch of

numbers

• Predictions from personality scales are quite difficult, so might be pointless

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Projective techniques

• Different philosophy of testing personality

• No scaling desired

• Standardisation not important

• Highly unstructured

• Mostly tied into psychodynamic personality theories

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Basic idea

• Any interpretation is partly due to the thing, partly due to personality of the observer

• If the “thing” is nonsense, then any interpretation is all personality

• Show people ambiguous stimuli, and ask for an interpretation• Look for patterns in interpretations

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Pros and cons• Can tap into the “deeper layers of the psyche”

• Lack of structure makes it hard to evalute• almost impossible to test construct validity

• No idea of reliability included

• Requires high amounts of training and experience to interpret• still disagreement between the “experts”

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Types of projective tests

• Word association tests• Given a word, asked to say the same thing that

comes to mind

• Must be interpreted against other information about the person

• Some standard lists (Kent-Rosanoff test)

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Types of projective tests

• Rosenzweig picture frustration study• Shown a picture of a frustrating scene, with an

open speech bubble, fill in the speech

• 3 forms: child, adolescent, adult (24 cartoons each)

• Checks:• direction of aggression

• type of aggression

• need-persistance

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Rorschach Psychodiagnostic method

• Hermann Rorschach Perfected the use of inkblots

• Cards are black & white as well as in colours

• Patients shown the cards, turning the card is allowed

• Examine the patterning of responses to the various cards

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The testing process

• Once the cards have all been shown, they are shown again - ask “what about the card made you say that” (inquiry period)

• After this, there can also be a testing the limits phase (ask if they can see particular things)• Warning! Warning! Reactivity!

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Scoring Rorschach

• Several methods, most common is Exner’s method

• Look for:• Location (Whole image, detail, whitepace)

• Determinant (colour, form, texture)

• Content (anatomy, blood, clouds, geography, fire)

• Popularity (common response or original one)

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Scoring Rorschach

• Several ratios etc. are computed

• Examples• constant mention of colour = emotional impulsivity

• Whitespace = oppositional tendency

• Ratio of form responses to colour responses = degree of cognition over emotion

• Total number of responses = mental ability (most reliable measure)

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Thematic Apperception Test

• Next most popular projective test

• Ask them to tell you a complete story about the ambiguous pictures on the card

• Assumption: client’s own needs, goals, etc will become apparent in the stories

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Scoring TAT

• Requires experts to score them

• Highly impressionistic scoring (low realibility)

• More validity than inkblots (?)

• Subtypes exist for the elderly and for children