Matakuliah
Tahun
: Psikologi Diagnostik
: 2010
Objective Assessment of Personality I
Pertemuan 1
Psychological Tests and Their Uses

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Psychological assessment techniques are designed to
evaluate a person’s cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and
social functioning.
Tests of personality and psychopathology can be further
subdivided into two specific types: objective and
projective.
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Theories of Personality
? The dynamic organization within an individual of those
systems that determine his or her characteristic behavior
and thought.
? Enduring, constant, and stable
? Distinctive and relatively stable pattern of behaviours,
thoughts, motives, and emotions that characterizes an
individual throughout life.
• Four groups of such theories have been developed in
the past century: trait, psychoanalytic, behavioral or
social learning, and humanistic views.
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Type of
Theory
Theorists/Theory
Biological
(or trait)
Gordon Allport,
Raymond B. Cattell
Psychoanalytic
Sigmund Freud,
Alfred Adler, Erik Erikson,
Carl Jung
Social
learning
Dollard & Miller,
Bandura, Skinner
Human behavior results from an organism’s
past learning, current perceptions, and higherlevel processes of thinking and organization
Humanistic
Carl Rogers,
Abraham Maslow
Human behavior can be understood only in
terms of the person’s internal perceptions of self
and others leading toward personal fulfillment
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* Major theories of personality
Basic Idea
Human behavior is traced to the joint effects of
the organism’s inherited capabilities and past
experience
Human behavior is determined by a person’s
past experiences, which color his/her
perceptions of current events
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Historical Overview

WW I – U.S. armed services
 Army Alpha (verbal) and Army Beta (nonverbal) tests of intelligence
for literate and nonliterate recruits, respectively.
 Robert S. Woodworth – Personal Data Sheet (1920)  later became
known as the Woodworth Psychoneurotic Questionnaire.

Cross-Out Test (Pressey & Pressey, 1919) – categorize
emotional states.
 lists of pleasant and unpleasant words.

Bernreuter Personality Inventory (1933), which
 Six subscales: Neurotic Tendency, Self-Sufficiency, IntroversionExtraversion, Dominance-Submission, Sociability, and Confidence.

1940s Hathaway & McKinley -- MMPI
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Theoretical Considerations of Test Construction

Theoretical Bases
 Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-III
 Child Abuse Potential Inventory
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Empirical Bases
Sixteen Personality Factor (16PF) – Raymond Catell (1940s)
 Costa & McCrae (1985) – 5 factor model

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Diagnostic Bases
The Beck Depression Inventory
 aligned with a current diagnostic system like the DSM-IV-TR (2000)
or ICD-10 (1992)

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Objective tests : Related issues
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•
•
•
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Psychometric concern
Range of population
Cross-cultural factors
Accommodation for populations with disabilities
Legal and Ethical issues
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Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
• Most widely used personality instrument
• Clinical & Employment settings
• Measures aspects of personality that, if extreme,
suggest a problem
• Long test - 567 questions
• Has several different scales (multiphasic)
• Scales thought to measure different kinds of
psychological disorders (e.g., depression)
• Overall assessment is interpretive
– From inspecting profile of different scales
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MMPI Score Profile
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MMPI Validity Scales
• Four scales designed to determine whether respondent
is presenting self accurately.
• Scales L (Lie), K (Defensiveness), and F (Infrequency)
are the validity scales originally developed by Hathaway
and McKinley
• ‘?’ (Cannot say) Scale
• Example: L scale (‘Fake Good’) - Trying too hard to
present self in a positive light.
– “I smile at everyone I meet” (T)
– “I read every editorial every day” (T)
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MMPI Sample Items
• I usually feel that life is worthwhile and interesting
– Depression
• Evil people are trying to influence my mind
– Paranoia
• I seem to hear things that other people can’t hear
– Schizophrenia
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