Introductory Psychology Concepts
Personality Assessment
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© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Introductory Psychology Concepts: Personality Assessment
Personality Assessment: Defining Types of Personality
• Interview: Subjective method that involves questioning.
• Observational Method: Watching a person’s actual
behavior in a natural or simulated situation.
• Test Standardization: Used to validate questions in
personality tests by studying the responses of people
with known diagnoses.
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© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Introductory Psychology Concepts: Personality Assessment
Personality Assessment: Defining Types of Personality
• Projective Personality Test: Uses ambiguous stimulus
and asked to describe it or tell a story about it.
• Rorschach Test: Show a series of symmetrical visual
stimuli and then ask what the figures represent to them.
This inkblot is similar to
the type used in the
Rorschach personality
test.
What do you see in it?
(Source: Alloy, Jacobson, & Acocella,
1999.)
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© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Introductory Psychology Concepts: Personality Assessment
Behavioral Assessments
• Direct Observation: Observing the person’s actual
behavior in a natural or simulated situation.
• Rating scales: An observer responds to specific items in
describing the behavior with a scale of answers such as:
“strongly agree,” “ agree,” “disagree,” or “strongly
disagree.”
• Frequency counts: An interval recording system including:
observation, recording antecedent behavior before the
event, and recording consequences after the event,
known as the Antecedent-Behavior-Consequences chart
(A-B-C chart).
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© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Introductory Psychology Concepts: Personality Assessment
Personality Inventories: Developed By Trait Theorist
One way to assess personality is through an extensive
interview which is used to determine the most important
events in childhood, social relationships, and success and
failures.
These self-report measures are also known as Personality
Inventory tests.
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© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Introductory Psychology Concepts: Personality Assessment
Personality Inventories: Objective Tests
• NEO-PI: Based on the Five Factor model, provides a
systematized assessment of emotional, interpersonal,
experiential, attitudinal, and motivational styles of one’s
personality.
• Myers-Briggs: Based on Jung’s Personality Types,
designed to look at what people perceive and how they
reach conclusions in order to understand their interests,
reactions, values, motivations, and skills.
• MMPI-2: Designed to detect abnormal personalities and
psychological difficulties; used to predict everyday
behavior.
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© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Introductory Psychology Concepts: Personality Assessment
Projective Tests
Based on the belief of psychoanalysts that the unconscious
mind is the basis of personality.
Projective tests ask the individual to interpret ambiguous
stimuli so that unconscious feelings will be “projected” in
the interpretation, much as a slide projector projects an
image on a blank screen.
• The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) (Murray, 1938, 1951)
asks the individual to make up a story about ambiguous
pictures.
• Psychologists believe that, because the stimuli are
ambiguous, the ego is not able to fully censor the
unconscious thoughts and motives that are projected into the
story made up about the picture.
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© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Introductory Psychology Concepts: Personality Assessment
Projective Tests
Even more ambiguous stimuli
are used in the Rorschach
inkblot test (Rorschach, 1953).
• Consists of 10 symmetrical
inkblots.
• Complex scoring systems are
often used with the Rorschach
inkblots, but many users
interpret the responses
subjectively.
• Projective tests are used less
today than in the past, largely
because research on their
validity has been discouraging.
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© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.