Lecture One

Question 1

History of testing and why is it good to know about it

Answer 1

• Understanding beginnings helps understanding current practices which may not make sense otherwise
• To better grasp strengths and weaknesses of tests
• The dangers of misuse of testing can be learned from history
• Psych testing as we know it has only ben around for 100 years of so but testing started long before that

Question 2

China 2200BC

Answer 2

• Emperor’s officials tested every 3 years
• By 202BC written exams introduced testing:
  o Civil law, military affairs, agriculture, revenue, geography
• By 1370 it was an incredibly gruelling experience
  o Started with day and night in isolated booth writing essays and a poem
  o 1-7% passed and went on to 3 sessions of day and night testing
  o 1-10% passed and went to Beijing for final round
  o About 3% passed so were eligible for public office
  o These were the original public service exams

Question 3

Psychiatric testing before psychological

Answer 3

• 1885 Hubert von Grashey, a German physician developed memory tests for brain injured patients
• German psychiatrist Conrad Rieger furthered tests for brain damaged patients but the battery took over 100 hours to administer
• Contribution was that standardised procedures could reveal nature and extent of symptoms in brain injured and mentally ill patients
• Most tests faded away over time

Question 4

Physiognomy, Phrenology, Psychograph

Answer 4

• Physiognomy dates back to Aristotle (384BC) & assumes you an judge a person’s inner character from appearance e.g. straight, thin, fair hair means a man is fainthearted, physically weak but quiet and harmless
• Kept evolving until Lavater (1741-1801) published his essays – 150 editions published
• He believed you can judge moral character by the examining a person’s face
• E.g. round face thought to imply a person who is caring, sensitive with strong sexual fantasies; ideal long-term stable partners or square face meant to imply analytic, intelligent, decisive, aggressive, dominant. Face shape was read with hair type, forehead shape eyebrows, ears etc
• Research still conducted but is more around perceptions associated with faces e.g. mature faces found to be perceived as more dominant which is attractive in males but not attractive in females. Females with eyes that made them appear less dominant were rated as more attractive

Question 5

Physiognomy – Phrenology

Answer 5

• Phrenology followed Physiognomy; reading bumps on the head
• Gall first to establish a link between the skull and human character and one of the first to propose that the brain housed mental capacity
• Studies of neural networks have debunked phrenology (Knight, 2007) although you can still find supporters of it (e.g. through non-peer-reviewed internet sources)

Question 6

Psychograph

Answer 6

• Phrenology gave rise to the Psychograph
• It could do a phrenological reading complete with printout rating 32 mental faculties (1-5)
• Earned $200 000 for its owners in 1934

Question 7

Brass instruments

Answer 7

• Late 1800s move away from subjective and introspective methods and into experimental psychology
• Testing moved to labs where methods could be replicated
• Problem: early experimental psychs thought intelligence could be measured by sensory perceptions measured by brass instruments designed to measure sensory thresholds

Question 8

Psychophysics (Fechner; 1801-1887)

Answer 8

• Was a scientist credited with introducing the ‘median’ into data analysis
• Based on the assumption that the human perceptual system is a measuring instrument yielding results (experiences judgements, responses) that may be systematically analysed
• Underlies much of current day research techniques

Question 9

Wilhelm Wundt

Answer 9

• Credited with first psych lab in 1879 but was measuring mental process years before that
• He had a ‘thought meter’; a calibrated pendulum with needles sticking out that would swing back and forth striking bells with the needles
• Observer would note pendulum position when bells sounded – he thought the auditory and visual stimuli would be perceived simultaneously – but that was not correct – difference between perceived position and actual proposed to reflect switness of thought
• Foundation of explaining individual differences

Question 10

Sir Francis Galton

Answer 10

• Cousin to Darwin and was more interested in problems of human evolution than psychology
• Obsessed with measurement
• Will deal with his theories of intelligence later in semester and his somewhat erroneous views
• Also devised ways of measuring beauty, personality, efficacy of prayer and how boring lectures were
• His legacy is that he demonstrated clearly that individual differences exist and can be measured with standardised procedures

Question 11

James McKeen Cattell

Answer 11

• Studied with Wundt and Galton before going to Columbia Uni where he spent 26 years as unrivalled Dean of American psychology
• Used RT to measure differences in mental reaction
• Expanded on Galton’s tests measuring motor skills (e.g. strength of hand, rate of hand movement, degree of pressure to cause pain)
• Based on idea that mental and bodily energy can’t be separated

Question 12

Clark Wissler

Answer 12

• One of Cattell’s psych students
• Greatest influence on early psych testing as he was the first to use mental test scores to predict academic performance
• Demonstrated there was no relationship between the mental tests devised by Cattell and Galton with academic achievement and virtually no relationship between the mental tests themselves

Question 13

Issues

Answer 13

• Psychs turned away from RT and sensory measures but Wissler had a restricted range of participants’ intelligence so correlations would be reduced
• RT unreliable because too few trials measured
• But it did pave way for more logical tests such as Binet’s and Wechsler’s
• Wissler, discouraged, moved to Anthropology, became an environmentalist and focused on explaining differences between ethnic groups

Question 14

Distinguishing between idiocy and dementia

Answer 14

• Esquirol (1772-1840) first to write of the differences saying that idiocy (mental retardation) was a lifelong developmental phenomena and dementia (mental illness) usually had an abrupt onset in adulthood
• Thought the first was incurable and the latter could be improved
• Used language to differentiate between levels of retardation (short phrases, monosyllables, cries with no speech)

Question 15

Seguin (1812-1880)

Answer 15

• Helped establish the new humanism toward people with an intellectual disability
• Developed educational programs and an experimental class
• Looked similar to current behaviour modification

Question 16

Alfred Binet (1857-1911)

Answer 16

• Prior to being the first to establish modern intelligence tests, Binet was in medicine but had a breakdown and swapped to psychology
• Studied under Charcot, a neurologist, just as Freud did
• Early methodological errors led him to be very careful of design by the time his intelligence tests were developed
• He pioneered individual psychology

Question 17

First iteration of current IQ tests

Answer 17

• Created in response to a practical need
• Prior to this little attention paid to children who were intellectually challenged
• No difference between ‘mental retardation’ and emotional disabilities recognised
• A new humanism toward such people was evolving following centuries of persecution, torture, ignoring or burning (witches)
• E.g., 1698 text called Flagellum Salutis advocated beatings for melancholia, epilepsy, paralysis etc

Question 18

Binet

Answer 18

• Using his daughters as subjects he learned that attention and suggestion were important variables when studying children
• Give an experiment appeal to children and endless patience which is quite different to the administration of current IQ tests
• 1896 argued that intelligence could be better measured by higher order mental processes rather than sensory processes like RT
• Hired by French government in 1904 to identify children who would struggle to learn in an ordinary classroom
• 1905 tests differed from previous in a number of ways:
  o aim was classification, not measurement, so used 30 different tasks to assess general mental development
  o Brief and practical to administer (less than an hour)
  o Measured practical judgement not low level sensory, motor
  o Items arranged by level of difficulty, not content type, and standardised with intended population and ‘normal’ kids

Question 19

Revised Binet-Simon

Answer 19

• In 1908 dropping most of the simplest items
• New items added at higher end of scale
• 1908 version had 58 items or tests
• many still used today e.g. reconstructing scrambled sentences, following a sequence of instructions
• detection of absurdities –
  o ‘the body of an unfortunate girl was found, cut into 18 pieces. It is thought that she killed herself’

Question 20

The last century

Answer 20

• Goddard translated the Binet-Simon (1906). Testing 1547 normal children he found 3% ‘feebleminded) and advocated they be segregated so as not to ‘contaminate society’
• Goddard called to Ellis Island where immigrants were held. It was proposed they were ‘feebleminded degenerates who reproduced at an alarming rate and menaced the nations overall fitness’

Question 21

Why do most books ignore Goddard

Answer 21

• He was a ‘heriditarian’ who called for colonisation of morons to restrict their breeding
• Insisted crime, alcoholism, prostitution was due to inherited mental deficiencies
• Claimed the average intelligence of immigrants was below 12 ‘perhaps of moron grade’
• Favoured deportation of low IQ immigrants or to use them as labourers if ’we were wise enough to train them properly’
• His views echoed societal views of the times and he recanted them in 1928

Question 22

Early non-verbal tests

Answer 22

• Realised tests not fair for non-english speakers
• The 10 block depression board (1913) still used by blindfolded participants in the Halstead-Reitan neurological test battery
• Howard Knox, a physician on Ellis Island, worked hard to develop non-verbal tests suitable to immigrants
• He agreed with Goddard that people failing the tests should be deported
• But he also recognised that some immigrants were traumatised rather than intellectually deficient

Question 23

Porteus maze test

Answer 23

• Another early non-verbal test still alive today developed at the University of Hawaii by Stanley Porteus who was Australian
• Is meant to measure frontal lobe functioning (e.g. planning, impulsivity)
• Start simple and become more complex

Question 24

Louis Terman

Answer 24

• The Binet-Simon further developed in 1911 and then Terman, at Stanford, developed the Intelligence Quotient (IQ), altered the tests for an American audience and called them the Stanford-Binet
• Latest revision was 2003 (5th edition)
• Wechsler developed a rival test that provided a full IQ score, verbal and performance IQ scores and 10-12 subset scores as opposed to Stanford-Binet’s single score (that’s changed now)

Question 25

Group tests

Answer 25

- As individual tests are so labour intensive, group tests emerged - The US entering WW1 in 1917, Robert Yerkes convinced the US army that its 1.75 million recruits needed to be tested for classification - Led by Yerkes, but also including Terman and Goddard, they developed the Army Alpha and Army Beta tests

Question 26

Army Alpha and Army Beta Tests

Answer 26

- Alpha consisted of 8 verbally tests for average to high-functioning recruits o Following oral directions, arithmetic, practical judgement, antonym-synonym pairs, disarranged sentences, number series, analogies, information - Beta was non-verbal for illiterates and those for whom English was not first language o Mazes, block designs, 3 dimensional drawings

Question 27

How the results were used

Answer 27

- They had no validity, poor instructions, inadequate facilities for administration and were used to support some high ranking officers - Arguably used as a tool of prejudice and racism - Later language difficulties were recognised as the reason for ethnic differences in test results

Question 28

Education tests

Answer 28

- These followed after the 1st world war - National intelligence tests developed in the 1920s was administered to 7 million children in the US - In 1925 the College Board decided to develop scholastic aptitude tests for admissions - Machine scoring introduced in the 1930s - Later developing into the current Scholastic Assessment Tests (US)

Question 29

Aptitude tests

Answer 29

- Assess more specific abilities than IQ tests - Such specifics needed in WW2 to isolate skills specific to being a pilot, flight engineer, navigator etc - Still widely used in the military

Question 30

Personality and vocational testing

Answer 30

- Woodsworth personality data sheet (1919) used to isolate recruits vulnerable to psychoneurosis - 116 forced choice format questions - current tests are modelled on this one - Unfortunately it was easy to fake good as questions obvious e.g., Are you bothered by feeling that things are not real - Likewise, wanting to avoid service, a normal person could fake bad - Thurstone’s Personality Schedule followed which was more statistically reliable - More on measuring personality in week 7

Question 31

Projective testing origins

Answer 31

- Word association, Galton, 1800s - 4 seconds to come up with as many words associated with the stimulus word - Brought to fruition by Jun in 1910 which comprised 100 words - Americans were working on objective tests while Rorschach (Swiss) developed tests to reveal unconscious thoughts and feelings (1920) - More on these tests in week 8

Question 32

Interest tests

Answer 32

- Yoakum’s Carnegie Interest Inventory (1919-1920) developed to help in counselling and guidance of ‘normal’ people - Strong Vocational Interest Blank (1927) - More later in semester