Personality Assessment (Aiken)

1. 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)

2. 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

3. 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)

4. 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)

5. 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

6. 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)

7. 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

8. 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 (?)

9. 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)

10. 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

11. 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

12. Projective techniques • Different philosophy of testing personality • No scaling desired • Standardisation not important • Highly unstructured • Mostly tied into psychodynamic personality theories

13. 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

14. 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”

15. 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)

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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!

19. 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)

20. 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)

21. 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

22. Scoring TAT • Requires experts to score them • Highly impressionistic scoring (low realibility) • More validity than inkblots (?) • Subtypes exist for the elderly and for children