Assessing Personality

Personality Testing

Psychological Testing

• Psychological tests assess a person’s abilities, aptitudes, interests or personality based on a systematically obtained sample of behavior.

2 Basic Goals

1. Accurately & consistently reflect a person’s characteristics on some dimension.

2. Predicts a person’s future psychological functioning or behavior.

Personality Assessment

Projective Techniques

• Interpretation of an ambiguous to trigger projection of one’s inner thoughts and feelings

• Used to determine unconscious motives, conflicts, and psychological defenses & traits

Rorschach Inkblot Test• Presentation and interpretation of a series

of black and white and colored inkblots• Developed in 1921.

• Personality test that seeks to identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of 10 inkblots

• Numerous scoring systems exist

Thematic Apperception Test• Series of pictures depicting ambiguous

scenes

• Subject is asked to create a story about the scene

• Answers are scored based on themes, motives, and anxieties of main character

Drawbacks to Projective Tests

• Examiner or test situation may influence individual’s response

• Scoring is highly subjective

• Tests fail to produce consistent results (reliability problem)

• Tests are poor predictors of future behavior (validity problem)

Testing for Traits:Self-Report Inventories

Personality Inventories

• Questionnaires on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors

• Used to assess selected personality traits• Often true-false, agree-disagree, etc. types

of questions• Person’s responses to standardized

questions are compared to established norms.

Validity

• The extent to which a test measures or predicts what it is suppose to test

• Personality inventories offer greater validity than do projective tests (e.g. Rorschach).

Reliability

• The extent to which a test yields consistent results, regardless of who gives the test or when or where it is given

• Personality inventories are more reliable than projective tests.

MMPI

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

• Most clinically-used personality test

• 500 total questions

• Originally designed to assess abnormal behavior

MMPI Scoring Profile

MMPI-2• Revised and updated version of the MMPI

• Assesses test takers on 10 clinical scales and 15 content scales

• Sometimes the MMPI-2 is not used as it was intended.

Other Self-Report Inventories

• California Personality Inventory (CPI) – assesses personality characteristics in normal populations.

• Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16 PF) – Cattell’s test that creates a personality profile on 16 trait dimensions.

Testing for Careers

• Play “Personality Testing for Career Choice” (3:59) Segment #28 from Psychology: The Human Experience.

Strengths of Self-Reports

• Standardized—each person receives same instructions and responds to the same questions

• Use of established norms: results are compared to previously established norms and are not subjectively evaluated

• Greater reliability and validity than projective tests.

Weaknesses of Self-Reports

• Evidence that people can “fake” responses to look better (or worse)

• Some people are prone to responding in a set way, whether the item accurately reflects them or not.

• Tests contain hundreds of items and become tedious

• People may not be good judges of their own behavior