What are the domains of personality assessment?
Organisational psychology
Clinical psychology
Educational psychology
Counselling psychology
Forensic psychology
Assessment, and personality assessment in particular, is a core element of psychological practice
What are some problems with personality assessment?
- Personality assessment
faces serious challenges
- Assessment appears to be
subjective
- There is no infallible source
of information about the
person
- The ‘object’ knows it is
being measured
- Personality traits are not
directly observable
What are the 2 concepts that determine how well personality is measured?
The degree to which personality is measured well is captured by two main concepts
Reliability: does the measurement yield consistent, dependable & error-free information
Validity: does the measurement assess what it is intended to assess & is it useful
What are the three varieties of reliability?
Internal consistency
* Do the components of the test all cohere?*
All test items should correlate with one another
Inter-rater reliability
* Does the test provide the same information about the person when different people administer it?*
Re-test reliability
* Does the test yield similar scores when it is administered to the same person on different occasions?*
Three kinds of measurement error: within the test, between testers, and over time
High reliability = high consistency = low error
What are the 2 components of validity?
Validity has two components:
Does the test measure what it is intended to
measure?
- Content validity*
Convergent validity - Discriminant validity
Does the test provide practically useful information - Predictive validity
What are the requirements for high reliability and validity?
So for a good test of trait X …
- All items should intercorrelate
- The same score should occur whoever gives it
- People should get similar scores when they do it twice
- All items should clearly relate to the meaning of X
- It should correlate strongly with other measures of X
- It should not correlate with measures of Y & Z
- It should correlate with things that X is related to
Reliability & validity are both essential, but if reliability is low, validity cannot be high: a test full of measurement error can’t predict anything
When does unreliability and invalidity exist?
Unreliability exists when there is inconsistency in what the test measures(scatter)
Invalidity exists when the test does not measure what it should (targeting the bullseye)
What are the kinds of personality measurement?
*Interviews
*Personality inventories
*Projective tests
*Implicit personality tests
How are interviews problematic?
Interviews are rarely used in personality assessment
- Time-consuming & labour-intensive
- Subjective (i.e., poor inter-rater reliability)
- Interview interactions are prone to biases
◦ Halo effect, self-fulfilling prophecy, confirmation bias
Sometimes they are used for assessing attributes where the person may not be a reliable informant, and/or where interpersonal & nonverbal behaviour may be revealing
- Personality disorders
What are the types of interviews?
- Structured
- Unstructured
- Semi-structured
◦ Combines structure & flexibility
‘Provocative’
◦ Type A personality
Describe inventories
Self-report personality tests
Composed of multiple items
Items form scales
- Omnibus tests with many scales
- Single-scale tests
- Generally at least 10 items per scale
Variety of response scales
- True/false
- Likert scales (strongly disagree ↔ strongly agree)
Discuss inventory development
- Item generation
- Pilot testing
- Item analysis
◦ Check internal consistency
◦ Factor analysis
- Select optimal items for final scales
- Re-test on new sample
- Correlate with other tests and prediction criteria
- Develop norms to allow score comparison
What are the problems with self-reporting? (inventories)
Inventories are vulnerable to response biases &
limitations of self-knowledge
Longer tests include validity scales to check for
this
- Lie scales - responding in a patterned way that identifies lies (faking good)
- Infrequency scales - high score = trying to be disturbed, actually generally overshoot, give worse responses than mentally ill people (faking bad, random responding)
- Defensiveness scales (subtle guardedness)
- Inconsistency scales (carelessness, random responding)
Discuss the MMPI
- Developed in 1940s for comprehensive clinical personality assessment
- 10 clinical scales, 3 validity scales; 566 items
- Scale development by selecting items that best differentiated known groups
- Scale scores converted to T-scores (M=50, SD=10) 70 = quite deivant
- Interpretation of scale profiles
Discuss the MMPI 4/8 code
- odd, peculiar
- non-conforming and resentful of authority
- problems with impulse control
- excessive drinking and drug abuse
- Deep feelings of insecurity;
- avoids close relationships, impaired empathy;
- withdraws into fantasy or strikes out in anger as defence against being hurt
- most common diagnoses are schizophrenia (paranoid type), schizoid personality & paranoid personality
What are projective tests?
Developed to bypass problems of self-report
Aim to penetrate to deeper levels of personality
- Dynamics, object relations, core motives
Allied with the psychoanalytic approach
Involve deliberate ambiguity & open-endedness
- Ambiguous stimuli
- Unstructured responses
- Based on the assumption that personality will be ‘projected’ onto stimuli without defensive distortions operating
What is the thematic apperception test (TAT)?
- Developed by Henry Murray
- Idiographic approach
- Series of monochromatic images
- Person tells extended story about what is happening in the picture
- Responses coded for repeated themes in the stories: motives attributed to protagonists, interpersonal conflict, ways of handling conflict etc.
Few widely accepted scoring conventions – a recipe for inter-scorer unreliability – but …
Rigorous scoring systems for defence mechanisms
- Denial & projection (Cramer)
System for scoring motives
- Need for achievement (McClelland); does not
correlate with self-reported achievement striving
What is the Rorschach Test?
- Evolved from 19th Century parlour game
- Series of symmetrical inkblots
- Person says what object(s) the person sees (the “percept”) and what aspects of the blot lead them to see it
- Responses are scored on numerous dimensions
- Number of distinct percepts
- Complexity/integration of percepts
- Content themes
- Plausibility of percepts (i.e., are they recognizable)
- Response to colour
- Use of shading, blank spaces
What are some critiques of projective tests?
- Time consuming
- Encourages ‘wild’, unconstrained interpretation
- Low inter-scorer reliability
- Predictive validity is generally weak compared to self-report tests
- Often there is little ‘incremental validity’ beyond self-report tests
What are implicit tests?
- New form of testing based on rapid, ‘automatic’ responses
- In principle difficult to fake & less susceptible to response bias
- Early evidence suggests these methods have promise
What is the IAT?
Four sets of words
◦Self: me, my, mine
◦Not-self: they, them, their
◦Extraversion: active, confident, outgoing
◦Introversion: aloof, reserved, serious
- Two ‘blocks’ of trials where person must rapidly classify words into different pairings of words
- If ‘self’ is more associated with ‘introversion’, classification will be quicker for the LEFT block
- Quicker classification for the RIGHT block if ‘self’ is associated with ‘extraversion
What are some theories for personality change?
According to many theorists, personality is essentially fixed in
adulthood
*Trait theory: traits are stable by definition
*Biological approaches: heritability may imply stability, but
maturational change can also be genetically programmed
*Psychoanalysis: childhood determinism
*Cognitive approaches: if personality is made up of cognitions and
cognitions can change, then personality is malleable
discuss Mischel et al (1990)
Mischel et al. (1990)
- 4 year-old participants did a delay of gratification task
- 11-14 years later they were re-examined
- Delay as a child was associated with
◦Greater planfulness
◦Greater stress tolerance
◦Better SAT scores
Casey et al. (2011)
*Delay of gratification at age 4
predicted greater self-control 40 years
later
Shlam et al. (2013)
*Delay also predicted lower BMI 30
years later
What is some evidence for stability?
Longitudinal studies of personality
Correlating personality scales across time allows a measure of “rank order stability’
Costa & McCrae report correlations of ~0.65 for the Big Five over a 20-year period after age 30
If someone is above average on a factor at 30, they have an 83% chance of being above average at 50 (5:1 odds)
Rank-order stability increases over time
Meta-analysis by Roberts & DelVecchio (2000) calculated re-test correlations over a 7-year period at different ages
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