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
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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:
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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:
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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
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difficult, so might be pointless
Projective techniques
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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
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